Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge, shot in Sydney previous year, has debuted at the Venice Film Festival to (mostly) raves. Andrew Garfield, cultivating a serious Anthony Perkins vibe, plays Doss, a gangly country boy whose slightly goofy demeanor conceals an odd cast of mind and a singular courage. A conscientious objector is an “individual who has claimed the right to refuse to perform military service”. And as repellent a figure as many may still find Gibson, I have to report he’s absolutely hit Hacksaw Ridge out of the park.
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Also spotted on the red carpet Sunday were Hugo Weaving, Vince Vaughn, Luke Bracey, Giulia Elettra Gorietti and Robert Schenkkan.
Ahead of Hacksaw Ridge’s November 4 release, read reviews of the film below. Unlike Perkins, what you’re not seeing this time is actually quite good. There aren’t going to be many more movies this year better than “Hacksaw Ridge”. The film stands on its own (if you’d never heard of Mel Gibson, it would work just fine), yet there’s no point in denying that it also works on the level of Gibsonian optics – that it speaks, on some spiritual-metaphorical level, to the troubles that have defined him and that he’s now making a bid to transcend.
Gibson has created some of the most breathtakingly exciting wartime footage in recent memory.
How the movie does at the Box Office is a different matter altogether but the story of a man who upheld his values, both as a Christian and a Seventh-Day Adventist, is truly inspiring. “It’s not possible to say if Hacksaw Ridge contains the most violent or gruesome combat scenes ever filmed, but let’s just say it resembles Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers without any of the satire or audience-winking”.
It’s been ten years since Mel Gibson, the Oscar-winning helmer of Braveheart, directed a film. The film, which Icon releases locally on Nov 3, “opens with a good chance of becoming a player during awards season”, per Variety.
The pic’s first half, in which Garfield’s Desmond Doss falls in love, enlists, undergoes boot camp and is court-martialled for refusing to pick up a weapon, proved more divisive, with reviewers finding it either winningly honest, if familiar, or just plain cheesy: the film “groans under a first half which seems to deliver one cliché after the next: setting up its broad narrative beats for a payoff that appears to be waving a flag from the get-go”, said Screen Daily. “Doss’ pacifism contrasted with the violence and heroism of the battle scenes, along with themes of redemption, are shaping up to be a talking point here in Venice”.
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The amusing thing about the “Mel Gibson scandal”, so-called, is that it occurred before the internet reaches full maximum outrage, or perhaps mass hysteria is a better way to put what happens now daily, hourly, on the internet where everyone begins to look like the enemy if enough fingers point in his or her direction.
