Movie Review: "Testament Of Youth"

"Testament Of Youth": B.  This British film is, essentially, a war movie with no shots fired but plenty of bloodshed.  The story follows four years in the life of Vera Brittain (Swedish actress Alicia Vikander), starting with Armistice Day in London, 1918, and quickly flashing back to the beginning of World War I.  The film is an adaptation of Brittain's memoirs, and thus is non-fiction.

Most of the people in England did not feel threatened by the outbreak of war precipitated by the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand over a thousand miles away in Sarajevo.  Even when England decided to send its young men into battle, the public under-appreciated the magnitude of the risks.  This was merely going to be a short-term skirmish, more an adventure than a life-and-death confrontation.  The boys would return as heroes within a year.  No need to disrupt long-term plans.  Joining the fray was the honorable thing to do.  How could a bloke look his mates in the eye if he was the only one in the group not to enlist?

Vera's dream is to become a professional writer, and the coveted credential to achieve that is a degree from Oxford.  Her old-fashioned father thinks spending tuition money to put a daughter through college is a waste; she should concentrate instead on finding a suitable husband.  Vera's brother Edward (Teron Egerton), to whom she is extremely close, goes to bat for her by helping to persuade dear old dad that the new piano he purchased to appease Vera is trivial compared to her prospective education.  Months later, Vera returns her brother's favor by convincing pops to allow Edward to go to war.  It isn't long before Vera wishes she could retract her sales pitch.

One of Edward's friends is Roland Leighton (Kit Harington).  He and Vera become engaged right before he boards a train to take him to his first military assignment.  What is it about train scenes in war movies?  Those settings, especially the plaintive engine whistles and the white steam wafting from the locomotive over the station platform, provide a great background for lingering goodbyes.  And of course all this is accompanied by a score of French horns and violins.

Vera is sure she failed the Oxford entrance exam, a section of which asked her to translate English passages into Latin.  Vera does not know Latin, so she does the next best thing; she makes the translation into a foreign language she does know, German.  The film has several scenes in which characters are receiving mail and reading other people's mail, sometimes at the addressee's request, sometimes not.  Vera is stunned when Edward opens the envelope and informs her that she passed the test.  But as the war gets closer to home and the Germans prove to be a much more stubborn and formidable adversary than originally predicted, Vera makes the tough decision to put her education on hold and volunteer as a nurse.

Vera is almost overwhelmed by the hospital wards where she toils.  Things get worse when she chooses to cross the channel to offer her services in "dangerous France," as her disapproving mother describes it.  The carnage is repulsive, but at least her long hours working tirelessly gets her mind off her brother and fiancé, who are near the front lines.  Seeing the effects of war from this vantage point informs the memoirs she would write almost twenty years later.

Like many other films which I've graded a B, Testament Of Youth is more interesting than entertaining.  The story arch is slow paced, and perhaps not surprisingly since we're dealing with early twentieth century England, the affection between Vera and Roland seems almost platonic.  For at least the first half of the movie, I was not sure if Vera had one, two or three brothers, as three similarly aged male characters (including Edward and Roland) often appeared together on screen and seemed fungible.  The muddled Brit accents did not help matters either.  Roland uses poetry, instead of conversation, to express his feelings for Vera.  That's great, I guess, if you're into poetry, but it is not all that effective for purposes of making a feature film. 

Watching Testament made me think of two other movies for divergent reasons.  Regarding the famous Hitchcock thriller Psycho (scanned here on January 7, 2015; A-), critics felt that the explanatory lecture by the psychiatrist at the movie's end was extraneous.  Some went so far as to call it an insult to the collective intelligence of the audience, which should have been able to draw their own conclusions and interpretations about main character Norman Bates.  Near the end of Testament, Vera delivers a sermon to a small but angry crowd which had gathered in London after the war to discuss reparations.  I felt the same way about that scene as the critics felt about the lecture in Psycho.  We already know, after almost two hours of viewing, that Vera views war as a senseless waste of humanity.  That outlook is firmly established once she is asked to treat mortally wounded "Huns" (as her colleague calls the enemy), and realizes if she hadn't before that those soldiers are pawns just like the British combatants.  If the film goers had been paying attention, Vera's unspoken message would have sufficed.   Therefore, Testament would have been better without the lecture, even though it gives actress Vikander a chance to showcase more of her talents. 

Testament also brought to mind Tangerines (reviewed May 15, 2015; B+), for the simple reason that both carry "stupidity and futility of war" messages.  The latter is a much more effective film, and comes without any closing sermon on the mount.