Canadian child actor turned writer-director Sarah Polley continues to prove she’s one of the great filmmaking talents of our time. Her four features — Away From Her (2006), starring Julie Christie as a woman with Alzheimer’s who opts to leave her husband before her memory vanishes; Take This Waltz (2011), starring Michelle Williams as a woman who strays from a comfortable marriage; Stories We Tell (2012), a documentary about Polley’s family and her complicated paternity; and now Women Talking, an adaptation of Miriam Toews’s novel about a contemporary Mennonite community in which women confront serial rapes by the men among them — are all sensitive, dramatically powerful, and stunningly performed and visualized stories about women taking responsibility for their own lives.
Toews’s story is based on events that took place in a Mennonite community in Bolivia between 2005 and 2009. The movie is set in 2010 in an unspecified location that resembles Toews’s native Manitoba. Having grown up in rural isolation, without learning to read and write (education is reserved for boys), the women are immersed in their austere faith, their families, and the work of maintaining their farms. After they and their daughters continually awake to evidence of being beaten and impregnated, it becomes clear that they’ve been drugged and assaulted. When two Mennonite men are arrested by the police for the crimes, others go into town to bail them out and the women must choose their plan of action: stay and forgive, stay and fight, or leave.
They are a varied group: old and young, rebellious and submissive. Frances McDormand, in a tiny role, plays a woman who’s afraid to act. Sheila McCarthy and Judith Ivey are heartrending as grandmothers anxious not to betray their daughters (or sons). And Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, and Rooney Mara are younger women desperate to shape their own futures — furious about the violence, yet serious about their faith and doing the right thing. There is also a man in their midst, played by Ben Whishaw, an excommunicated teacher, who records their proceedings, as well as a trans man (August Winter) who goes mute after being raped.
Polley brings extraordinary tension to the film — the men will soon return — and expertly weaves the drama between the threat of violence and the resulting existential debate. There’s nothing facile or self-serious about the arguments being made, and the men, despite their monstrous behavior, are not aggrandized as villains — in fact, they’re mostly absent. The result is a remarkable film that’s currently streaming on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and other sites. Despite Oscar nominations for Polley’s screenplay and Best Picture, Women Talking is probably too uncompromising to end up a winner.
Another nominee, lead actor Bill Nighy in Living, is also in a film about existential reckoning that is not favored to take home an Oscar. The film is an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, the story of an aging Japanese bureaucrat who learns he has terminal cancer and less than a year to live. The Kurosawa film was an early influence on celebrated British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day), who, with Living, has seamlessly adapted the story to London in the 1950s. Ishiguro is nominated for best adapted screenplay.
The tragedy of Living, and the source of its sentimental redemption, is that Nighy’s local bureaucrat is so repressed, regimented, and polite that he doesn’t even know how to let loose and enjoy himself when he is told his death is imminent. He searches vainly for some meaning and value in his life and then miraculously finds it. Viewers will realize that the clues for this are there from the beginning. Director Oliver Hermanus does what he can to flesh out the emotional experience, but Nighy, to his credit, plays it close to his vest. You can see everything in his eyes, hear everything in his voice. Living is a simple parable and not nearly as revelatory as the Kurosawa. (Currently, it’s screening only in theaters.)
Like Living, the new German production of All Quiet on the Western Front, adapted from the 1929 Erich Maria Remarque antiwar novel, is a remake — there’s a 1930 Hollywood version, starring Lew Ayres, and a 1979 TV movie with Richard Thomas. Remarque was hardly alone in recalling the butchery of World War I and the grinding nightmare of its front-line trenches. But the book is especially significant as a German attack on German militarism (Hitler banned it). To have a German-language adaptation in 2022, during Putin’s pointless and deadly melee in Ukraine, is even more apt. The movie, which is streaming on Netflix, is the front runner at the Oscars for Best International Film and recently won a BAFTA award, the British equivalent of the Oscars.
The gist of Remarque’s novel, told entirely from the point of view of its hero, Paul Bäumer, is that war squelches innocence, obliterates the natural world, and twists whatever spiritual grace humans possess into a perverse dance of death. The new film version, directed by Edward Berger, channels these themes and expands on them, focusing more closely on the systemic institutional corruption behind the war and the dubiousness of warriors’ sense of honor.
A prologue depicts a young soldier’s entrance into the trenches and quick death, leading to his jacket being rehabbed for Paul (Felix Kammerer) when he and his friends joyfully enlist. Paul then descends into circles of hell as his friends are picked off one by one. Paul himself faces lethal enemy fire only minutes before an armistice is declared in November 1918.
Berger’s focus on visual and aural spectacle makes the human-interest story seem secondary and the mechanics of the plot more obvious. At two and a half hours, it’s a drawn-out affair and a barrage on the viewer — all hope is flattened way before it reaches its apex of horrors.
Despite the praise lavished by some critics, others have lamented the many deviations from Remarque’s novel. I agree with them. The famous Hollywood image of Ayres reaching for a butterfly and being shot, when “all is quiet on the Western front,” is replaced with a clock-ticking charge to the armistice. The quiet is there, in an enduring natural landscape, but synthetic evil remains the deeper theme.
