Cast: Jonathan Pryce, James Wilby, Jonny Lee Miller, Stuart Bunce, David Hayman, Tanya Allen, John
Neville
Director: Gillies MacKinnon
Producers: Allan Scott, Peter R. Simpson
Screenplay: Allan Scott based on the novel by Pat Barker
Cinematography: Glen MacPherson
Music: Mychael Danna
U.S. Distributor: Alliance Communications Corporation
Regeneration is Gillies MacKinnon's look at the horrors of war (specifically, World War One) and the effects they have on the men who must endure them. Like Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, this is not an anti-war film, but a frank look at the human cost of any battle. Regeneration does not argue that war is wrong, but it asks us to question, without looking through a haze of patriotic pride, when a nation's political, economic, or moral position is in enough jeopardy to warrant the horrifying debt of blood that will inevitably be incurred.
In the wake of Saving Private Ryan, the opening scene of Regeneration lacks the impact it might otherwise have had. The images of trench warfare carnage – of the injured and dead lying half-buried in mud – are not as graphic or as visceral as those placed on the screen by Spielberg, but they are still gut-wrenching. MacKinnon (The Playboys, Small Faces) does not show us much battle action, but what we see (mainly through flashbacks) is disturbing. Starkly filmed, with nearly all of the color leeched from the print, these sequences have more power than anything else presented in Regeneration, and forcefully echo the opening twenty-five minutes of Saving Private Ryan. It is virtually impossible to see Regeneration and not to think of the other movie, if only fleetingly. And it is worth noting that MacKinnon's film was in the can before Spielberg's went before the cameras.
The majority of Regeneration, which is adapted from a novel by Pat Barker, takes place within the walls of Craiglockart, a Scottish hospital for those whose war wounds are to the mind and spirit, not the body. The story centers around four men: established poet and war hero Siegfried Sassoon (James Wilby), neophyte writer Wilfred Owen (Stuart Bunce), shell-shocked officer Billy Prior (Jonny Lee Miller), and the doctor who treats them all, William Rivers (Jonathan Pryce). Sassoon has been sent to Craiglockart to discredit him, because his current philosophy, that the war has become one of "aggression and conquest" is a source of embarrassment to his senior officers. While there, he strikes up a friendship with Owen, and the two spend many hours talking about writing. Meanwhile, Prior, who is fighting to break through a memory blockage, is romancing a local munitions plant worker (Tanya Allen). And Rivers, who is gradually taking on the burdens of all his patients, is on the way to a breakdown. His character arc – from a strong, self-assured psychiatrist to a stammering, conscience-stricken man – is the film's most dramatic.
Rivers is the individual who provides the film with its glue, and actor Jonathan Pryce breathes life into him. Pryce is a fascinating performer, equally capable of playing over-the-top villains like Bond's nemesis in Tomorrow Never Dies and the Irish terrorist in Ronin, as well as deeply-realized individuals like Lytton Strachey in Carrington. Rivers represents one of the actor's finest portrayals, a once-confident doctor who slowly crumbles under the onslaught of pain he absorbs from the men under his care. There is no melodrama here, just good acting and solid writing. Rivers is allowed to retain his dignity. The other primary performances, especially that of Jonny Lee Miller (Trainspotting, Afterglow), are solid.
Although Regeneration is not as devastating a motion picture experience as Saving Private Ryan, it touches upon many of the same subjects. This movie is more cerebral and reserved, but it makes at least one telling point about the dehumanizing experience of war – often, the deepest wounds endured in battle are not those done to the body, but those suffered by the mind. Doctors may be able to regenerate flesh, but mending a broken spirit requires considerably more time, energy, and skill.
© 1998 James Berardinelli