“A powerful film about the monotony of war and the deconstruction of its heroism.”
Just a few weeks after Alex Garland’s imagined civil war scenario topped the US box office, Italian (but US-focused) director Roberto Minervini is unlikely to replicate that feat with his bleak look at America’s actual, and so far only, civil war. The Damned, the title of Minervini’s first feature film in twelve years, leaves little to the imagination with regards to the fate of his protagonists, and this sober tale of gnawing doubt about the war being fought is the polar opposite of Garland’s nailbiter, even if it does feature a tense 10-minute shootout of its own. What it does share with Civil War is the realization that in war there are people on both sides, people with dreams, hopes, and the longing for loved ones. “You end up realizing your family is a whole lot more important than your country,” muses one of the soldiers, underlining the futility of Americans fighting Americans. The Damned is a powerful film about the monotony of war and the deconstruction of its heroism; its strength is that the portrayed army unit could as easily have been a confederate one, and the conversations they’d have would have been just the same.
The year is 1862, and a voluntary unit of the US Army is dispatched to scout an unspecified region of the American West. They are a varied bunch from all walks of life: young, old, godfearing, godless. One thing most of them have in common is that they’ve rarely shot a gun, let alone killed someone. For a good while the enemy they have to fight is boredom; the American prairie has a certain beauty, but its harsh climate can also be unforgiving, especially when you don’t see a soul for days. Card games and bad coffee can only get you so far, so mostly the men talk amongst themselves to while away the time. It’s the 19th century, so God’s word is frequently brought up in the contemplations, especially when it comes to the reason why each of them joined the army. Notions of biblical good and evil are discussed, although not all of them believe in any sort of holy mission anymore. One of them quotes Matthew’s gospel, “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword,” to then solemnly add, “I think we crossed that line.” This comes after a prolonged gunfight with an unseen enemy in which the unit loses half its men; it is the only spurt of excitement in an otherwise downbeat film that matches the tone of Minervini’s 2015 documentary The Other Side, a film about people on the margins of society. Much like the subjects of that film, The Damned‘s soldiers are also on the fringe, both in terms of location and state of mind.
After the shootout, as they mourn the dead and care for the wounded as best they can, the horrors of war stare them in the face. One of them trying to wash the blood of a fallen comrade out of his shirt in a cold stream, tears rolling down his face, is a harrowing reminder that war isn’t about heroes and the adrenaline of the battlefield; war is death. As the unit is forced to break up, the futility of going forward weighs heavily on them. “I don’t even know why I’m here anymore,” says a young soldier who wanted to fight alongside his father and brother. Yet here he finds himself, on a mountain with strangers, ankle-deep in snow, battling frostbite: why is he here indeed? Where is the glory in fighting people who are essentially not that different?
Minervini’s film is as much about the battle of man with himself and his conscience as it is about actual war. The brutality of combat is shown side by side with the brutality of trying to reconcile with the fact that war turns everyone for the worse, which is what the admission of crossing a biblical line alludes to. None of the soldiers is named, as if not to give them too much identity; their nemeses are not even given faces. All of this emphasizes that wars are fought by nameless, forgotten people. Minervini shoots in a wide 2:1 frame, but often in close-up, thereby retaining the intimacy that has marked his documentary work; Carlos Alfonso Corral’s cinematography reminds one of Emmanuel Lubezki’s lensing for The Revenant, with the surroundings evoking last year’s The Settlers (but even bleaker, if that’s possible). That’s another film about men with guns for whom the purpose of their mission starts to elude them, although Felipe Gálvez Haberle draws clearer lines between good and bad. Minervini, however, as he so often does in his documentaries, doesn’t judge and doesn’t choose sides like most Civil War movies do. The Damned is not about who is morally right or wrong, but about the meaninglessness of morals when you are staring down the barrel of a gun; where are morals and lofty ideas when it’s you or him?
(c) Image copyright: Okta Film, Pulpa Film