Edward Berger’s German-language version of Remarque is superbly made and hard to watch, with a three-note score that sounds like a siren going wrong. It is also a film that keeps explaining what its own trenches have already shown us.
Erich Maria Remarque’s novel came out in 1929 and Hollywood filmed it the following year. It has taken until now for Germans to film it in German. Edward Berger, directing from a screenplay he wrote with Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell, decides what the book is about before anyone has spoken. A soldier dies in a charge across the mud. His uniform is stripped, laundered with hundreds of others, patched at a sewing machine, folded and issued to Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), who asks about the name inside the collar and is told the tunic was probably too small for its last owner. It is the best five minutes in the film. Everything the next two hours say, they say here first.
Kammerer has not made a film before this one, and it shows in the right way. His Paul begins with a round, eager face and Berger spends 147 minutes emptying it. He barely speaks. Remarque wrote in the first person; this Paul has no narration and no home leave, so he cannot tell us what he thinks and has nowhere to set the front against. What he has is Kat. Albrecht Schuch plays Stanislaus Katczinsky, an older cobbler who cannot read and has his letters read to him, and the scenes the two share, stealing a goose from a farmyard, eating it in a barn, are the only ones in which anyone smiles. Schuch does the most delicate work in the film, most of it with his shoulders.
James Friend shoots it wide and cold, blue-grey in the trenches, brown in the mud, and keeps cutting back to the woods: a fox with her cubs, mist on a hillside, trees carrying on as if nothing were happening below them. Christian M. Goldbeck’s trenches are wet to the knee and his headquarters for General Friedrichs (Devid Striesow) has white tablecloths. Lisy Christl’s costumes carry the argument in cloth; the recycled tunics get shabbier as the boys inside them do. Then there is Hauschka’s score: three distorted notes, low and enormous, that arrive like a fault in the machinery whenever the film wants us afraid. They unsettled us more than any shell did, and they are the one thing here we had not heard before.
The set piece in the middle, when French tanks come out of the smoke, is where we were horrified. Berger and his editor Sven Budelmann hold on the machines for a long while before showing what they do, and then show it plainly: men under the tracks, men who cannot climb out of a shell hole in time, a flamethrower turned on a dugout. We looked away twice. We also noticed, by the film’s third assault, that we had stopped looking away at all, and we do not think that numbness was intended. Remarque’s point is that the fighting went on and on and changed nothing. Berger makes the point by making it three times.
The screenplay also adds a story the book does not have. Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) travels to a railway carriage in a forest to ask General Foch (Thibault de Montalembert) for an armistice, while Friedrichs eats well in his chateau and will not accept that the war is lost. Brühl is good, quiet and frightened; Striesow is sure of himself to the last. The point is clear: old men in warm rooms, boys in cold mud. But the trenches have already made it, and every cut to the carriage takes us away from Paul, who is the film. Several critics have made the same objection. We would add that Friedrichs is written as a monster, when an ordinary officer doing his job would have been more frightening.
Most critics have been warm and a few rapturous. The one dissent worth weighing says the film is handsome, competent and adds nothing to what war films have been saying since 1930. We are between the two. The uniform sequence, the score, Schuch and Kammerer are additions. The second half is not. Set against 1917 (2019), which several reviews reach for, this is less pleased with its own camera and more honest about what shrapnel does to a body. Set against the 1930 film it is louder, colder and shorter on the boys’ lives before the war, which is the part of the book that hurts.
See it, if the subject is yours, in the biggest room you can find with the sound up; Hauschka’s three notes need space. Certificate 15, 147 minutes, and both numbers are honest. Do not eat first.
