Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) when they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative.
“You see, you can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the same name)
Opening Chatter (no spoilers): As we’re moving into cooler weather (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), people are clustering inside more, and predictions of rising danger from the newest COVID variants continue to escalate, I’m still not that interested in being in a crowded theater so I continue to explore what’s available on streaming, with a couple of very intriguing (although gruesome) offerings to suggest to you this week. The first one’s another attempt (after an early Oscar winner in 1930, then a generally-forgotten 1979 TV movie) at exploring the horrors of WW I as seen from the perspectives of young German soldiers who got so much more (none of it comforting) than they expected when they rushed off to volunteer for combat against the Allies in All Quiet on the Western Front. You can easily know the outcome of the war itself, but I will employ a Spoiler alert regarding the specifics of this fictional story inspired by the real events of those brutal years of European combat, an intense study of the unnerving reality that quickly erases any sense of necessary patriotism in the lives of these teenage soldiers (available only to Netflix subscribers). My other choice is more directly “based on a true story,” this one about a nurse, Charlie Cullen (Eddie Redmayne), who in the latter part of the 20th century into the very early years of the 21st used his position in the various hospitals where he worked to quietly kill many patients (several dozen for sure, maybe as many as a few hundred), until a co-worker nurse, Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain), got suspicious, then clandestinely worked with police detectives to bring him down in 2003 (this is just on Netflix too). Also, here are links for the schedule of the cable network, Turner Classic Movies, providing you with a wide selection of older films with no commercial interruptions and the JustWatch site which offers a wide selection of options too, for streaming rental or purchase. If you'd just want to see what reigned at the domestic (U.S.-Canada) box-office last weekend, go here.
Here’s the trailer for All Quiet on the Western Front [2022]:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge it; activate
that same button or use the “esc” keyboard key to return to normal size.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
What Happens: In spring 1917 as Germany and its WW I wartime partners are locked in bitter combat with the European/U.S. Allies, back in his hometown 17-year-old Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) gets help from his school buddies to forge enlistment papers for the Imperial German Army so he can join in with this war-enthusiastic-group of Albert Knopp (Aaron Hlmer), Franz Müller (Moritz Klaus), and Ludwig Behm (Adrian Grünewald), energized by their teacher to join the war effort for the glory of their home country. As they enlist, though, Paul gets a uniform that already has a name in it with a claim this is simply one that proved to be the wrong size for recruit Heinrich Gerber (Jakob Schmidt), although we’ve seen in the opening scenes how he was killed in combat (in harsh wintertime, including a symbolic shot of a dead wolf) with his uniform (like hundreds of others) pulled off his body, sewn up to hide the telltale-bullet-holes, washed, put back into service for the battlefield’s-next-likely-corpse. Paul and his friends are sent to the same location, the Western Front, in the Flanders area of northern Belgium, a territory viciously fought over by French and German troops, where they’re befriended by older Stanislaus “Kat” Katczinsky (Albrecht Schuch) who wants to help acclimate them to the cruelties of trench warfare (where even rain turning open tunnels into mud is a miserable experience), although Ludwig’s killed on the first night in this area, then Paul nearly joins him until Franz and Albert dig him out of a pile of rubble after Allied shellings.
After enduring such gruesome battle experiences, Paul’s quickly drops his fascination/romantic understanding of the “glories” of war, even as, by November 7, 1918, German official Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brüel), worn down by his army’s local loses (around 40 thousand), meets with the German High Command to seek an armistice with the French, while Paul and Kat steal a goose from a farm to cook, share with Albert, Franz, and veteran Tjaden Stackfleet (Edin Hasanovic), given their official rations (turnip bread) barely keep them alive. On November 9, 1918, General Friedrichs (Devid Striesow) brings Erzberger and a German delegation to negotiate with the French, even as Paul and his group search for missing comrades who they find died after removing their gas masks too soon. Despite his participation in the peace talks, Gen. Friedrichs opposes the treaty, orders an attack in the Forest of Compiègne before French reinforcements arrive, at least to gain more territory for his homeland before the war’s end, so Paul’s regiment is sent to the front lines again (a visual that indicates the stress they’re under is the sight of bullet holes in their helmets, telling us they’re fortunate to still be alive), yet they’re soon routed by French troops as the assaults gain so very little.
On November 10,1918, Supreme Allied Commander Ferdinand Foch (Thibault de Montalembert) gives the Germans 72 hours to accept surrender terms. Friedrichs’ troops are successful at first in their attack but then are driven back by superior technology, especially tanks and flamethrowers, Albert dying in the process. Paul ends up in a crater with a French soldier, stabs him, yet during this man's slow, painful death Paul has regrets, tries to no avail to tend to the wounds. Germany’s leader, Kaiser Wilhelm II, abdicates, ending the war as Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg accepts the Allied terms on the symbolic day of November 11 at 11am. ⇒Paul returns to his unit, finds them celebrating the war’s end, but even though Paul and Kat bring food to wounded Tjaden he’s distraught at now being a cripple so he kills himself. Just before the war’s end Paul and Kat try one more theft from that farmer, but the man’s son shoots Kat who dies soon after (he noted: “God looks down at us murderers”); Gen. Friedrich orders one last German attack at 10:45am, with Paul killing several Frenchmen before being bayoneted himself just before the war’s official end, with a young German soldier later taking his scarf and dog tag (just as we saw earlier with these dog tags being collected from numerous German bodies after a battle so officials could have a record of who died even though their bodies were simply buried on site).⇐ Final graphics tell us 3 million perished on this Western Front, 17 million in total during WW I (a supposed “war to end all wars”—if only it was!).
So What? Embarrassed as I am to admit it, I’ve never seen the Louis Milestone version of this story (1930)—based on a novel of the ongoing-same-name (1929), a brutal anti-war exploration of these horrors by German author Erich Maria Remarque, a WW I vet (no, I haven’t read the book [big surprise!] but I’m happy to know it was considered offensive enough to the Nazis to be banned, so I have even more respect for it)—in that this older film won the Oscar for Outstanding Production (much later it also got 91% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes), what we now call Best Picture (also won Best Director award) for releases of the official 1929/30 period, the first all-dialogue sound film to do so (the initial round of Oscars saw the top prize go to another war film, Wings [William A. Wellman, 1927] for the 1927/28 period, followed by a lively musical, The Broadway Melody [Harry Beaumont, 1929] for the 1928/29 cycle, those first 2 getting trophies for what was called Outstanding Picture). For that matter, I’ve also not seen the 1979 TV movie version (Delbert Mann, same title), but you can join me (if necessary) in atoning for such shortcomings if you watch this video (18:23 [ad interrupts at 3:25]) which is a rapid summary (the narrator seems to be on a heavy dose of caffeine—or, if she normally talks this way she must exhaust anyone who attempts to listen to her) of both the actions of WW I and Remarque’s novel, with the book descriptions illustrated by clips from the 1979 TV adaptation. (To me, based on summaries I’ve read of both the 1930 [stream it for a $3.99 rental on Apple TV+] and 1979 [streams on fuboTV, which I know next to nothing about except that it’s expensive: $69.99 or more monthly, although for a lot of broadcast/cable channels] cinematic versions and the book, the Webb version seems, like the Milestone one, to follow events of the novel even more so than this current release, with Paul in these other versions in the hospital for awhile, allowed to go home on leave where he’s astounded the locals still have such a passionate support for the war, seemingly oblivious of the extended cruelty fighters on both sides of the war's front face.)
Then, if you’d like to get some sense of the Milestone version of this narrative, here are a couple of short clips from it, first (6:34) with French attacks, then the Germans counter-attacking, followed by this one (2:26) where Paul’s killed by a sharpshooter while reaching from a trench toward a butterfly (seeing some beauty), then the final shot of soldiers marching superimposed upon a field of crosses (referencing Canadian poet/WW I battlefield physician John McCrae’s "In Flanders Fields" (1915); at the end of this clip are options for more clips of the 1930 film). But, with all of that as background, what can we say about the latest incarnation of this story that shows the grim reality of soldiers moving in waves from trench to trench, many dying in each seemingly-useless-assault as short-lived-“conquests” are frequently reversed, with deaths in even more brutal fashion than in previous wars due to vicious technologies of machine guns, hand grenades, poison gas, tanks, and airplanes.
Well, to start with in looking at this newest version of an established story, this is a German film exploring Remarque’s text rather than an American adaptation with Hollywood actors portraying Germans, so what they say is in German with subtitles, but hopefully that won’t alienate too many of you potential viewers who don’t care to read dialogue, because the power of this story is in its impactful visuals (but nothing too gory or grotesque, despite the reality of battlefield termination being shown in dreadful wartime context); further, you may hear more about it months from now as it’s Germany’s official entry in the Oscar contest for Best International Feature Film. The aspects of this story continue to have debilitating-power over the decades in their various print or filmic forms, as the purpose here is to condemn the patriotic fervor that sent these young men so eagerly into the killing zone, only to find no glory, no honor in serving the Kaiser, only grotesque death along with near-intolerable-conditions during every day they were able to stay alive. “War is hell” is a clear message here, although “War is a desperate ploy” by those who have little to gain otherwise is another theme, as we see in our current world with the relentless assault by Russia on Ukraine, in an attempt to revive the long-collapsed Soviet Union. However, if you find that even the minimal depictions of the savagery of war in All Quiet on the Western Front (an ironically false statement from the German command during that era) is a bit too hard to watch, I’ll recommend another classic about that era, Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937)—streams on Apple TV+ for $3.99 rental—which explores the absurdity of this intra-continental-debacle from the French perspective but without the graphic bloodshed of All Quiet … (though containing a similar sad, sober death scene).*
*A final note: A German officer calls the Western Front in Belgium a “God-forsaken shithole” as Paul and his friends are sent there. That’s what I once said in frustration about my job as an educational multimedia supervisor at Queens College of the City University of New York (1972-’73). I was reminded of that at a farewell celebration by some of the folks I shared the time with just before I left to return to Texas to work on my Ph.D. in order to get into the more “lucrative” aspects of academia.
Bottom Line Final Comments: While there’s been some (virtually-unknown) theatrical presence of this film since October 14, 2022, that’s just part of the usual strategy of streaming services (since the OMICRON pandemic’s eased off enough for some level of audiences to return to theaters) to get in the requisite public screening week or so for later Oscar consideration, but the main way to access this film is by Netflix streaming (always free if you’re a subscriber, although that does cost $10 monthly in the U.S. for the Basic plan [low HD quality, 720p], $15.50 for Standard [Full HD, 1080p] $20 for Premium [HD and 4K], as of November 3, 2022 [there’s also a $7 monthly low HD, 720p, but it comes with ads if you can tolerate them; I'll pass, thanks]). The CCAL will encourage you to make that All Quiet ... decision with Rotten Tomatoes reviews coming in at a high 92% positive rate while the normally-less-enthusiastic-Metacritic-folks give what’s quite encouraging for them, a 75% average score (more details with connections to these sites in Related Links far below, a regular feature of all of our postings), so keep that level of enthusiasm in mind when considering making a decision to watch this film. Admittedly, it’s not easy to deal with seeing men trying to defend their country’s vision of the world while being slammed to death by bullets or even more vicious means, but it does help those of us who’ve never been faced with life or death on a battlefield to better understand the constant fear and ambiguity about why this is even happening as these depictions are riveting, extremely successful in helping us understand the true horror of war if all we really know about it consists of newspaper/radio/television reports of missile strikes, fractured facilities, collateral deaths in the daily reports from the misery currently ripping apart normal life in Ukraine. Indeed, if you can stand to watch what’s depicted in All Quiet on the Western Front (just as seen earlier in the similarly-devastating 1917 [Sam Mendes, 2019; review in our January 22, 2020 posting]), I think you’ll find it well worth your time (and emotional investment) to get another cinematic dose of just how awful war truly is, with some hope that such awareness might help us collectively find ways to avoid it as best we can in whatever future's left for us to navigate moving on.
I’ll sign off on All Quiet … with my usual tactic of a Musical Metaphor to give a final avenue of insight to the subject of the review; this time the choice could easily be Edwin Starr’s "War"—“What is it good for? / Absolutely nothing […] They say we must fight to keep our freedom / But Lord knows there’s gotta be a better way”—or Bob Dylan’s "With God on Our Side"—“The First World War, boys / It came and it went / The reason for fightin’ / I never did get / But I learned to accept it / Accept it with pride / For you don’t count the dead / When God’s on your side […] If God’s on our side / He’ll stop the next war.” But, despite the obvious relevance of songs such as these, I’m further drawn to Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Patriot’s Dream” (on his 1972 Don Quixote album) at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=jsaJYxzTdTA with it’s even-more-relevant-lyrics (delivered partly in an ironically-upbeat-manner, to match the enthusiasm of our young protagonists, not yet knowing what they were about to encounter, but it slows down in the middle reflecting their grim reality) to this film, such as: “The songs of the wars are as old as the hills / They cling like the rust on the cold steel that kills / They tell of the boys who went down to the tracks / In a patriotic manner with the cold steel on their backs […] The patriot’s dream still lives on today / It makes mothers weep and it makes lovers pray / Let’s drink to the men who got caught by the chill / Of the patriotic fever and the cold steel that kills.” Our species has been at war with itself probably since the dawn of our emergence from the plains of Africa (ad interruption at about 5:20, damn it!). Will we ever learn to find other ways of settling our differences and fears short of killing each other (whatever the inspiration for such acts may be)? We can only hope that stories such as the one in All Quiet on the Western Front will help give us incentive to search for alternatives to such madness. (Do you hear me, Mr. Putin, you horrid beast?)
SHORT TAKES
Based in historical fact, only slightly fictionalized, this is the true-life horror story of a nurse, Charlie Cullen, who, for reasons known only to him, took it upon himself to kill an unknown (but large) number of hospital patients with hard-to-notice lethal injections until a co-worker, Amy Loughren, became suspicious, then worked with the police to help get him arrested, confess to these murders.
Here’s the trailer:
As this film’s based on the actual account of a nurse, Charles Cullen (Eddie Redmayne), who killed many patients in the 10 hospitals he worked in, plus further focus on parts of the nonfiction-book by Charles Graeber (The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder [2013]), with easy access to the facts of the case on the Internet along with clear publicity about this story already indicating Cullen’s guilt, I’ve seen no need to be concerned about Spoilers here, although you might want to watch this short video (10:16) to get insights on those facts (lots more background on Cullen too, as with the book) vs. any docudrama-creative-license presented in The Good Nurse. Even if you somehow began your viewing with no knowledge whatsoever of the upcoming events of this narrative, you’d get a sense in the opening scene in 1996 at St. Aloysius Hospital in PA (fictional, probably to avoid legal problems with places where Cullen worked) where a patient dies of a seizure but the camera shows only Cullen watching, the image slowly zooming in on him with his impassive countenance, that there’s clearly something unsettling about this guy, so when he moves on to Parkfield Memorial Hospital in New Jersey (also fictional, based on Somerset Medical Center in Somerville NJ) in 2003 and other deaths begin to occur with patients he’s assigned to, it’s easy enough—along with local police detectives Tim Braun (Noah Emmerich) and Danny Baldwin (Nnamdi Asomugha)—to suspect there’s something dangerous about this man, even as he’s initially defended by his new colleague, Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain), as he seems competent, eager to help in a location where understaffing’s resulting in overwhelming physical/mental exhaustion for Amy who’s also bearing the burdens of blood blisters on her heart (cardiomyopathy)—she could easily have a stroke, a condition corrected only by a transplant—but she can’t reveal this to her superiors as she needs to work for 4 more months to provide the needed medical insurance for the operation (she doesn’t get much relief at home either, where as a single mother of 2 young girls, she’s constantly getting grief from the older one [9, I think; she could be 11], Alex [Alix West Lefler]).
When Amy almost passes out at work one day she confides her situation to sympathetic Charlie who not only keeps her secret and takes on extra duties at work but also visits her home, easily building up nice rapport with the kids. So, when a couple of patients mysteriously die, the police investigators learn (clandestinely from Amy) the toxicology reports show unneeded insulin and digoxin in these victims implying lethal additions to their saline IV drips, but when the cops try to get needed info from the hospital, they’re stonewalled by administrative board risk manager, Linda Garran (Kim Dickens), just as others of the many hospitals where Charlie’s previously worked have nothing negative on record concerning him (although he's had some trouble with the law previously).
Quietly on her own, now-curious-Amy visits her friend, Lori Lucas (Maria DIzzia), who worked with Charlie at a previous job, learns several patients died with unneeded insulin in their bodies. Amy checks Parkfield’s IV bags, finds some to be contaminated; meanwhile Garran fires Charlie due to a discrepancy in his employment application (seemingly riding the institution of any further concerns about him), so the detectives send Amy, wearing a wire, to meet him at a diner hoping to get a confession but he resists, leaves, although he does note where he has a new job (You can go here for the director’s analysis of this scene [5:32]), resulting in cops arresting him there; still, they can’t get anything out of him, with time running out on their 48-maximum-holding-restriction so Amy volunteers to talk to him, finally leading him to confess ultimately to 29 murders although speculation is there might have been as many as 400; horribly, he never revealed why he did it (graphics over the closing shots also tell us Amy got her heart transplant, now lives in Florida). Prior knowledge of what happens here, along with blatant clues about Charlie as the scenes unfold take away any sense of mystery about his guilt (Redmayne’s facial expressions when he’s not with Amy are unnerving as well), plus there’s great frustration in not learning any motive for these mass-murders along with disgust that none of the places were Charlie worked made any attempt to explore what seemed to be connections between him and the deaths of so many patients (“They didn’t stop me.”).
Yet, whatever this story lacks as a mystery is balanced out by these 2 superb Oscar-winners (Redmayne for The Theory of Everything [James Marsh, 2014; review in our November 19, 2014 posting], Chastain for The Eyes of Tammy Faye [Michael Showalter, 2021; review in our January 13, 2022 posting]), so it’s quite a watchable-experience, especially to celebrate the heroism of Amy Loughren who pushed herself beyond her physical limitations/pain to help bring about the demise of this clandestine psychopath. If you’re intrigued by watching process more so than result in this true-crime-drama, you likely didn’t have much theatrical option (except in South Korea where it opened on October 19, 2022, taking in $15 thousand), but it’s available for Netflix streaming subscribers. The CCAL’s reasonably supportive (RT 80% positive reviews, MC 64% average score), overall joining me in recommending you give this one serious consideration. For a Musical Metaphor I’ve gone a bit afield here, choosing The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm” (from their 1971 L.A. Woman album) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9o78-f2mIM due to its haunting atmosphere and lyrics about “[…] a killer on the road […] If you give this man a ride, sweet family will die / Killer on the road,” so you have to follow me down a metaphorical road here, but I think you’d find the film and song to be compatible, creepy as both are if you’re still in any sort of a post-Halloween state of mind.
That’s all for my critical commentary this week (which usually reminds me of some parting lyrics from Pink Floyd’s "Time": “The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say,” or maybe R.E.M. knows me even better [from "Losing My Religion"]: “Oh no, I’ve said too much / I haven’t said enough”), but whether you agree with any of that stuff or not I’ll offer you one more opportunity to be in unity with an attitude that would benefit all of us, James Taylor’s "Shower the People" (on his 1976 In the Pocket album), because we should “Shower the people you love with love / Show them the way that you feel / Things are gonna be much better/ If you only will.” We’re now sailing through divisive times; it could be a smoother ride if we’d only help each other a bit more.
Other Cinema-Related Stuff: (1) What's new on Netflix in November 2022; (2) What's new on Amazon Prime Video in November 2022; (3) What's new on Hulu in November 2022; (4) What's new on Disney+ in November 2022; (5) What's new on HBO/HBO Max in November 2022; (6) Why foreign language films don't get U.S. Oscar voters' attention.
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
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Here’s more information about All Quiet on the Western Front [2022]:
https://www.netflix.com/title/81260280
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcZxuOZ1pV8 (4:06 statement by military historian/author Rupert Wieloch on why this is an important film for modern audiences)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/all_quiet_on_the_western_front_2022
https://www.metacritic.com/movie/all-quiet-on-the-western-front-2022
Here’s more information about The Good Nurse:
https://www.netflix.com/title/81260083
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxGV5io8Bvw (6:13 interview with actors Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_good_nurse
https://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-good-nurse
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