JONNY LEE MILLER IN REGENERATION

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Regeneration shames Private Ryan

by Peter Keough

REGENERATION. Written and directed by Gillies Mackinnon. With Jonathan Pryce, James Wilby, Jonny Lee Miller, Stuart Bunce, Tanya Allen, David Hayman, Dougray Scott, and John Neville. An Alliance Pictures release. At the Kendall Square.

Steven Spielberg's celebration of the savagery and heroism of war begins with fire, water, and blood and ends with platitudes. Adapted from Pat Barker's historical novel Regeneration, Gillies Mackinnon's tortured analysis of war's morality begins with mud and by the end is still immersed in it. An overhead track shot of a World War I no-man's-land shows men and parts of men, the dead and wounded of both sides, submerged in the same gray morass; the camera skips over a parapet to reveal weary British soldiers sipping tea.

Like Saving Private Ryan, Regeneration begs a justification of this horror. It seeks, however, not decency but sanity. In the face of such obscene absurdity, contrasting unthinkable disaster with pitiful decorum, is not madness the only rational, even moral option? Yet (perhaps inevitably), though Regeneration is the more honest movie, it is also less cinematic. Despite its flashes of nightmare imagery, it bogs down in murky talk like a stilted and not especially illuminating group-therapy session.

The voice of reason in this case is Dr. William Rivers (Jonathan Pryce, looking appropriately compassionate, stoical, and distraught), an actual British psychiatrist whose daunting and dubious assignment was to treat shell-shocked officers with Freudian analysis and make them fit once again for duty. Among the patients sent to him at his hospital in Scotland's gloomy Craiglockart Castle is the poet, war hero, and war protester Siegfried Sassoon (a bland James Wilby). Sassoon offers a unique challenge: far from being insane, he is supremely rational. Although he won a decoration for heroism and is beloved by his troop's command, he has issued a declaration of protest against the war, which he quite reasonably believes is sacrificing a generation of young men to benefit political and other profiteers. Facing court-martial, he's persuaded by his friend and fellow poet Robert Graves (Dougray Scott) to spare himself and his cause by accepting a stay in Craiglockart for observation.

If Sassoon's ailment is speaking out, that of officer Billy Prior (a forceful Jonny Lee Miller in the film's most resonant performance) is not speaking at all. Mute and amnesiac from some repressed trauma, he communicates with a notepad, ripping off pages like a crisp salute on which are written things like "No more words." Unlike Sassoon and most of the other officers at Craiglockart, Prior is from the lower classes, an enlisted man who worked his way up through the ranks. Although asthmatic as well as traumatized, he's determined to get back to the front line and prove himself again.

Sassoon and Prior never really meet, so the clash of classes and sensibilities remains just a suggestion. Instead, Sassoon is accosted by dreamy Wilfred Owen (Stuart Bunce), who's smitten by Sassoon's verse and perhaps more (Sassoon's homosexuality is barely footnoted). Whatever disorder Owen suffers from is reduced to a certain wistfulness and a recurring image of an ominous canal that ultimately proves one of the film's most haunting images. If Sassoon's response to language is to utter protests and Prior's is to remain silent, Owen -- whom some believe might have rivaled T.S. Eliot had he lived -- prefers to use it to transform the unbearable into the sublime.

Unfortunately, Owen's role in Regeneration is marginal. He's seen lounging on the desultory grounds (in an apt but oppressive touch, everything is immured in the muddy tones of the front -- no sunlit, bucolic escapes here), nodding with Sassoon over a book of verse or comforting a less fortunate patient found naked and surrounded by slaughtered wildlife in the woods. Instead, Regeneration circles around the feckless Dr. Rivers, whose talking therapy is frequently broken by stutters engendered by the abominations he must rationalize.

He has at least one success: he hypnotizes Prior and returns him to the scene of primal horror that undid him, and with one accusing eye Regeneration achieves much of the impact and point of Private Ryan's famous opening sequence. Rivers also persuades Sassoon to return to duty for the good of both causes. And Owen, for whatever reason, returns to meet his fate.

But there remains that staring eye, and the even greater success of Rivers's colleague Dr. Yealland (John Neville). Yealland treats shell-shocked patients with electric shock, sticking a probe down their throats and basically torturing them into being fit for duty. It's quicker, he points out, and less painful, and they all end up in the same place anyway. This is one of the few moments of eloquence in Mackinnon's well-meaning but inarticulate movie. That and the snippets of Owen's poetry. Rivers reads his last words and weeps. It's not enough to wash away the mud, but it is the beginning of clarity.

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Regeneration is based on the real-life experiences of British poets and war heroes Seigfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Billy Prior, who spent some time in a military loony bin in the care of resident army psychiatrist Dr. William Rivers during The Great War.

What Regeneration lacks in narrative drive, it makes up for in the provocative exchange of ideas between Sassoon, a writer and war hero who has publicly condemned the war, and Rivers, whose job it is to get these men back to the French front tout suite. When does a war become unjust? Of what exactly is Dr. Rivers curing these men? Their common sense? Sassoon wonders how long he can defend his idealistic condemnation of the war when he knows that many of his men, deprived of his skilled leadership, will perish in battle. Rivers begins to question his role in the carnage, as he ushers scores of 'cured' soldiers on to their deaths.

Sassoon's mentorship of the poet Wilfred Owen encourages the young man to write some of the greatest anti-war poetry of our time. There is a subtle yet tangible homo-erotic current running between them. Ironically, Sassoon also suggests that battle might improve Owen's poetry, leading him to return to the perilous front. The young Scottish war hero Billy Prior (Luan's note...Sorry to butt in but...Scottish??? In the Book Billy is From Manchester and to be honest I could never place my finger on what accent Jonny was supposed to be doing - some generic Northern accent - but it was most certainly NOT scottish!!!) recovers from his combat-induced muteness then decides he must return to the front to recover his pride. But will he be allowed to? And what of the local lass who has taken a shine to him?

Filmed and released well before the wildly successful Saving Private Ryan, Regeneration is sure to be overlooked by those who want their war stories visceral and formulaic. However, for those who want movies to challenge their intellect and stimulate post-film going discussions, Regeneration is clearly the superior choice.

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Fighting for sanity

Regeneration goes back to the trenches of WWI

REVIEW:

REGENERATION

Starring Jonathan Pryce, James Wilby. Written by Allan Scott from the novel by Pat Barker. Directed by Gillies MacKinnon. (STC) Opens Aug. 14.

BY GEMMA FILES

1998 seems to be our year for "forgotten wars" in cinema: first Saving Private Ryan's vision of wholesale slaughter on Omaha Beach during the D-Day invasion of Normandy, now Scots director Gillies MacKinnon's stunning new portrait of what was once called the "War to End All Wars" -- the mud-filled trenches of 1917, the Somme and the enduring, dreadful legacy of World War I.

In Regeneration -- based on Pat Barker's Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name, and adapted for the screen by Allan Scott -- the real battlefield lies in the broken minds of those survivors who manage to reach the relative safety of Craiglockart Military Hospital. There, psychiatrist Dr. William Rivers (Jonathan Pryce), himself hovering on the verge of a nervous breakdown, has been handed the unenviable task of making his patients sane enough to go back to France... and probably die in an increasingly insane-seeming war.

It's a wrenching story, well and subtly told, full of authenticity and ragged power, though it does tend to err a bit too much on the side of dignified restraint. It does well to keep in mind, however, that Regeneration's characters -- from Rivers and his most famous patient at the time, poet/soldier Siegfried Sassoon, to shy young aspiring bard Wilfred Owen, whose fame would eventually eclipse Sassoon's -- are historically documented figures whose very real trauma provides the heart of the movie's drama. As Pryce hastens to point out, therefore, Regeneration's most lasting strength may well lie with its educational value.

"When I was in school," Pryce told me, at last year's Toronto International Film Festival, "the First World War was still 'the Great War,' part of the most recent history you studied. Yet today, very few young people at all know anything about what was the most horrific leap forward in military technology and mass destruction -- the true beginning of everything we now take for granted, unfortunately, in 20th-century warfare."

MacKinnon, who I interviewed at the same time, agreed. "Making this film became a very personal project for me, because I grew up talking to old men in bars in Glasgow who had fought in the Somme. They used to tell me how they'd been brought up as Catholics, taught to believe in God, but that after their experiences, they simply couldn't believe in him any more.

"These men had weapons tested on them that had never been used before. They were the first generation gassed. You had cavalry going up against machine-guns, in mud so deep some soldiers literally drowned in it. And even if they stayed alive, a lot of them came home shell-shocked."

In the film, Dr. Rivers' patients range from upper-class poet Sassoon (James Wilby) -- who finds himself labeled crazy after publishing an illegal pamphlet proclaiming his belief that the war is unwinnable -- to angry young man Billy Prior (Jonny Lee Miller), a lower-class lad whose traumatic experiences on the battlefield have earned him an officer's commission, but also rendered him psychosomatically mute.

"Sassoon was the only one in Craiglockart who didn't have shell-shock," says MacKinnon. "He'd made this declaration against the war, even though he was an extremely brave and efficient soldier, so they sent him to a mental hospital to avoid having to court-martial him. So Rivers has to take somebody who's entirely sane, and make him mad enough to go back and sacrifice himself for a cause he doesn't believe in."

One of Regeneration's most powerful passages showcases the difference between Rivers' techniques and the methods of Dr. Yealland (John Neville), who "cures" the mutism of lower-class soldiers who don't have Prior's rank by torturing them with primitive electroshock therapy.

What's really haunting about the scene is the sense that Rivers, while morally repulsed by Yealland's actions, can't help but envy both his unblemished rate of "success" and his apparently untroubled conscience.

Says Pryce: "The fact is, we seem to have learned very little since the First World War about the mental fallout of being asked -- or forced -- to kill people for a political cause. It's amazing that post-traumatic stress syndrome could still be seen as a 'new' phenomenon as late as the Vietnam War, when Rivers was treating it back in 1917."

"Here's a bit of irony for you," says MacKinnon. "We were still shooting the war scenes when November 11 came around -- Armistice Day, now our Remembrance Day. And we all stood there in the mud and thought well, we're cold and we're wet, just like they were... but the main small factor to bear in mind is that nobody's actually trying to kill us."

He pauses. "So if Regeneration has to have a lesson to teach -- I suppose that'd be it."

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Hushed Intensity

Regeneration, adapted from the prize-winning novel by British writer Pat Barker, is a quietly poetic, marvelously subtle exploration of the horror and moral dilemmas that war always brings in its wake. It's a small film, and unlikely to make a big splash, but it packs a hushed intensity that is devastating.

The unfortunately all-too-familiar story, this time, is set during World War I, and is peopled with real characters and places. Siegfried Sassoon (James Wilby), the noted poet and anti-war protestor, is, paradoxically, also a British war hero, laden with medals. One day he simply can stand no more of the senseless killing and writes a letter of protest to the authorities that is widely publicized. Military higher-ups, anxious to have his actually quite sensible protestations taken as the ravings of a shell-shocked madman, have him sent to the military hospital at Craiglockart, Scotland, where he encounters the caring psychiatrist William Rivers (Jonathan Pryce). Dr. Rivers has a bevy of "loonies" for patients, each more bizarrely disturbed than the other, but the film focusses on Sassoon and Billy Prior (Jonny Lee Miller), a working-class man who has become an officer, a feat in classist Britain, but whose horrible experiences in the trenches have caused him to become mute.

British director Gillies MacKinnon has wisely avoided the ultra-realism of Saving Private Ryan (which is also ultra-expensive) in favor of a more visually and aurally symbolic depiction of this especially horrible war which ended up killing nearly 10 million men. More importantly, he has chosen to express the moral quandaries of war in personal, viscerally confrontational scenes shot mostly in small dark rooms in the mental hospital or in the dark and autumnal grounds that surround it, rather than through the hyped-up, powerful dramatic action that Spielberg prefers. Both these methods can be effective, and both can be valid — they're just different.

Sassoon represents that part of civilization that naturally recoils at the grotesqueness of war while Rivers stands for the practical, survivalist side of humankind that knows that conflict is inevitable and that one must simply stand firm, against all odds, or be lost. In the hospital, Sassoon also encounters and nurtures the work of Wilfred Owen, the Great War's greatest poet, and much of the film's power results from the occasional recitation of his poetry. (Unfortunately, one of his most power-packed poems ends with the Latin Horatian tag, "Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori" — It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country — so a translation of the line has to be clunkily stuck in an earlier scene's dialogue.) And Prior, who wants to be sent back to the front so that he can say, at war's end, that he acquitted himself admirably, also gives a hint of a different aspect of war's moral complexity when he admits that going into battle "was like sex — exciting and ridiculous." The movie also excels in its depiction of warring theories of psychology that pre-date our own era's conviction that every mental malady can be cured with a pill. Rivers, a deeply humane partisan of "that Viennese quack," is contrasted with Dr. Yealland, who simply tortures soldiers manifesting hysterical symptoms such as mutism until they overcome them.

But the heart of Regeneration — a title that reveals itself as deeply problematic as the film proceeds — lies in Rivers' one-on-one encounters with the deeply disturbed men at Craiglockart, whom he must cure so that they can be returned, nonsensically but inevitably, to the killing fields. Perhaps most provocatively, MacKinnon has also chosen to preserve the book's vague but unmistakable whiff of homoerotic subtext to all these encounters. All in all, it's an admirable pendant to Saving Private Ryan that demonstrates there's usually more than one road available to get to the same place.

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Since I started this series in August, more than a few people have been asking me whether or when I am going to write about 'Saving Private Ryan'. Unfortunately I probably will have to disappoint all of them not because I have particular distaste for Hollywood hits(although it is true that most movies I have reviewed so far happen to be either foreign or independent productions) or I don't think 'Saving Private Ryan' is a good movie. In fact, I like most of Spielberg's nondinosaur works and would highly recommend you to see 'Saving Private Ryan' if you haven't already done so. Yes, its first twenty minutes may be the bloodiest and the most shocking movie experience you can ever have. But like most war movies, 'Saving Private Ryan' offers us nothing more than a verbatim reproduction of the war. To me, it is always another kind of war movies that would be more likely to catch my attention. In those movies, you don't get to see a lot of blood. You don't get to hear the deafening sound of bomb explosion. Nevertheless, when you are watching them, you won't have the faintest doubt about cruel reality of war. Last year's British movie 'Regeneration' is one of that kind.

'Regeneration' sets most of its scenes in a military mental hospital in Scotland during World War I. All the patients in the hospital are suffering various types of mental illness because of their respective traumatic experiences on the battle field. Some of them become mute, some of them don't remember anything about the past, and some of them just go crazy. So we see Dr. William Rivers, the chief psychiatrist in the hospital, using Freudian talk therapy to treat these 'loonies'. His task is to fix their mental problems so that they could be sent back to the war. When we are watching the movie, we are actually sitting with Dr. Rivers with his patients and hearing them talking or not talking about the blood, the wounded, and the dead. No, those people are not firing guns (they don't even carry guns in the hospital). They are not facing death on a daily base. They are well fed and well treated from beginning to the end. But from every move they make and every word they say, you feel the war. In one of my favorite scenes, Prior, one of Rivers' patients, is making love to his new found love, Sarah, in stunningly beautiful Scottish wilderness. No, there is no background music, not even the ecstatic moans from lovemaking. The only sound you can hear is explosion. One bomb goes off after another.

During war time, it is pointless to differentiate between the wounded and the unwounded, because no one can be spared of the wound no matter how far away he/she keeps him/herself from the battle field (in the movie Dr. Rivers' own mental state deteriorates rapidly because of his constant interaction with his patients). Likewise, it is also meaningless to talk about the difference between the sane and the insane. Those who send people to the front are as mad as Dr Rivers' patients. War turns the whole world into a loony bin. The dead can be buried; blood can be washed away; physical wound can always be healed. But how and when can you stop the madness from spreading? Or is there ever going to be a regeneration?

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REGENERATION Gillies Mackinnon Makes A Powerful Film

Gillies Mackinnon, born in Glasgow (1949), is one of the most interesting British filmmakers around at the moment. In 1995 he made Small Faces, about three brothers growing up in youth-gang dominated Glasgow in the sixties. It was produced and written by his brother, Billy.

Earlier films of Mackinnon are The Grass Arena, The Playboys and Trojan Eddie. Before he made films he studied mural painting in Glasgow and worked with disturbed teenagers. His latest film, Regeneration, is adapted by Allan Scott, in a very clear way from Pat Barker's Booker Prize winning novel of the same name.

As so often when we deal with quality film, and Regeneration is very good indeed, Mark Shivas' name pops up again as one of the producers. Shivas produced Anthony Minghella's Truly, Madly, Deeply and Michael Winterbottom's Jude, among many other good films.

Regeneration is set near the end of the First World War (1914-18) in Craiglockhart hospital near Edinburgh. Psychiatrist Dr Rivers, magnificently played by the always intriguing Jonathan Pryce, has the task of curing mentally wounded soldiers, so that they can return to the front.

The film focuses on three remarkable men. The poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and a young officer, Billy Prior, who lost his speech in the trenches and feels contempt for Dr Rivers. Prior is powerfully played by Jonny Lee Miller, who we know from Trainspotting. Siegfried Sassoon is portrayed in a strong and unyielding way by James Wilby. Sassoon is in the hospital, because he wrote a pamphlet against the war. Not because he is a pacifist, but because he thinks that those in power are unnecessarily prolonging the war. In the hospital he meets the gentle humanist Wilfred Owen (an amiable part by Stuart Bunce), who initially doesn't want to write about war, because he doesn't think poetry should deal with an ugly subject like that. Sassoon stimulates him to write about his traumatic experiences in the trenches, and this results in some of Owen's best poems like Anthem for Doomed Youth, Dulce et Decorum Est and Six o'Clock in Princess Street.

The film deals with the way Dr Rivers appears controlled, but inwardly he is in conflict as he deals with the sarcastic Sassoon, the romantic Owen and the angry Billy Prior. Throughout the film Mackinnon uses grey flashbacks of the trenches full of corpses, but he never wallows in it or sensationalises.

The strength of Regeneration is the script, which is to the point and focused, the careful and skilful direction of Gillies Mackinnon, and not to forget the superb production design by Andy Harris, topped off by the under-rated and therefore powerful playing of all the actors, including the sweet faced Tanya Allen, who is Prior's girlfriend. Jonathan Pryce deserved an Oscar for his role in this film, certainly he is one of the best British actors around.

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Movie Takes

By James Bowman

Regeneration, directed by Gillies Mackinnon from a screenplay by Allan Scott and based on the novel by Pat Barker, is another retelling of the great left-wing myth that came out of the Great War: that it was all the generals' fault. "Half the seed of Europe," to use Wilfred Owen's angry poetic formulation, were sacrificed unnecessarily. For nothing but pride. Or "the old lie" (to quote Owen once again) that dulce et decorum pro patria mori est. The real lie is the leftist promise that all the hard things in the world--whether fighting wars or earning a living or raising your children--can be avoided if you design a political system cleverly enough. The slaughter of the First World War was shamelessly exploited by both of the twin tyrannies, fascism and communism, that dominated the mid-century, and was vital to the success of both.

In fact, the war was a serious business. It was fought for the leadership of Europe and the world, and both Europe and the world would be vastly different places today if the Germans had won it. But the prevailing popular view of the conflict has come down to us through those that Pat Barker and her cinematic collaborators here memorialize: the overgrown, self-pitying adolescents Siegfried Sassoon (James Wilby) and Wilfred Owen (Stuart Bunce), who met at the Craiglockhart hospital for shell-shock victims (Sassoon, a war-hero, having been sent there because of a political protest against the war), decided that it was evil old men who designed the thing out of mere spite, just because they hated young and beautiful youths like themselves.

In one scene the sympathetic and understanding Dr. Rivers (Jonathan Pryce), brought in to "cure" Sassoon of his heterodox political views, asks him what he hopes to accomplish by his protest, which had included hurling his Military Cross, the second-highest British decoration for bravery, into the River Mersey. "What do you want?" asks an exasperated Rivers. And Sassoon--echoing one of his most famous poems--says, "I want it to stop." To the film's credit, the note of childish petulance is undiluted. It reminded me of nothing so much as the anger the homosexuals in Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On directed against Ronald Reagan about AIDS. When a huge and terrible misfortune happened to them, instead of facing it like adults, they looked around for someone to blame. And the one they blamed was the national father-figure.

Interestingly, the supposed homosexual relationship between Sassoon and Owen, which has been an object of so much academic interest, is never mentioned in this film, and Sassoon's sexual orientation is only mentioned obliquely when Rivers animadverts on the army's encouragement of comradeship and masculine love, but only when it is "the right kind of love"--as if making such distinctions were itself a sign of corruption or logical inconsistency. It also supplies an emphatically heterosexual shell-shock victim, Billy Prior (Jonny Lee Miller), as an excuse for a bit of feminine pulchritude, in the person of Tanya Allen, as well as the introduction of the alleged class-dimension of the war that the upper-class Sassoon and Owen could not provide. Billy is a working-class boy with nothing but contempt for the "public-school fools" and "noodle-brained dimwits" who, he can take it for granted, are running the war. (Luans note - Anyone who has actually read the whole trilogy will know that Billy is actually bisexual)

Even the "racist" character of the mostly unseen bad-guy warmongers gets a mention when two of the doctors at Craiglockhart mention Sassoon's Jewish blood and conclude that he has something of the delicacy of "a hybrid creature." But Owen gets it more nearly right before he has fallen under Sassoon's influence when he explains why it is he has not written, up until that time, poetry about the war. He once found in a trench in northern France, he tells the older poet, a clutch of skulls that could have been deposited there a year before or centuries ago, during the campaigns of the Duke of Marlborough over the same ground. Suddenly he saw in an instant, he says, the Great War as nothing but a "distillation of all the other wars"--and as such something more like a force of nature than a gratuitous political act. But in our century there will always be those who promise, and those who are foolishly ready to believe, that there is an easy way out.

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War Torn - Sane and Shell-shocked.

As Steven Spielberg and company have demonstrated, war movies can mean big money and big prestige. U.S.-made world war movies were once the province of studio assembly lines, with stock characters and situations. Non-U.S.-made world war movies have always tended to be less nostalgic and celebratory, suggesting that the "good wars" were never so good for their participants.

The ravages of World War I were painfully recorded by photographers and journalists, as well as soldiers who became artists during and after their service. It took shape from a collision between new technology (including poison gas and tanks) and outdated combat etiquette, like marching in lines into full-on assaults. The experiences dramatized by the British soldier-poets were among the most appalling, in part because they were so astonished by the ugliness: often they were young, wealthy, and well-educated, and completely unprepared for what they saw and did in war.

The movie Regeneration evokes this bitter, demoralizing experience. Shot in grey and brown tones, without exhilarating camerawork or rousing musical score, it focuses on the ways that combat destroys the lives of its survivors. Directed by Gillies MacKinnon (whose dark comedy about underclass kids, Small Faces, came too closely in the wake of Trainspotting to have its own life), the film opens with a terrible overhead sweep of a muddy battlefield, after the fight: most bodies lie still, crumpled and bloody. At the end of the shot, the camera cranes down and barely pauses to show a soldier who can only sit and stare, overwhelmed.

This is the film's subject, being so overwhelmed. Most of the action takes place in an asylum near Edinburgh called Craiglockart, where psychiatrists treated what they used to call "shell-shocked" soldiers, typically with the goal of sending them back to the front. One of the doctors there was William Rivers (played by Jonathan Pryce), and two of his patients were the poets Siegfried Sassoon (James Wilby, best known as the protagonist in Maurice) and Wilfred Owen (Stuart Bunce). This much is factual. The rest of the screenplay (by producer Allan Scott) is quite loyal to its source, Pat Barker's fictionalized account of their encounters, the novel Regeneration, which is the first part of an intricate trilogy featuring the same characters, followed by The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road (winner of the 1995 Booker Prize).

Rivers attempts to make Sassoon "well." According to Rivers' superiors, this means convincing the young man to recant his outrageous declaration that the war was morally unsound and a slaughter, perpetuated for political and economic purposes. Sassoon was sent to Craiglockart rather than a court-martial and likely death sentence, because his fellow officer and future memoirist Robert Graves (Ever After's Dougray Scott) intervened. Skeptical of his assignment, Rivers meets and diagnoses Sassoon: he's not suffering a "war neurosis," as he has been accused, but rather, a "powerful anti-war neurosis."

As combat veterans, both men know that this is a sane response to the war. They bond in this knowledge, tacitly agreeing that efforts to "cure" the poet are absurd. But Rivers fears for Sassoon's life, because, he knows the poet will be attacked for "other reasons" (namely, his homosexuality), charges which would likely lead to prison, at least. Further, the doctor is battling his own demons. He has his own increasingly acute case of shell-shock derived from hearing horror stories from his patients. And so, Rivers and Sassoon engage in ongoing arguments that might be characterized as philosophical, save for their very real consequences.

At the same time, their differently evolving emotional lives are revealed in other relationships. Sassoon befriends a fellow inmate, the as-yet unpublished poet Owen, and encourages him to work on his writing, to use it as therapy. Ironically, Owen does get "well" enough to return to France, where he is killed, in 1918. And Rivers works with Billy Prior (Jonny Lee Miller of Trainspotting), an officer from a working-class background whose muteness is an affliction more often suffered by upper-class soldiers. (The first world war was one of the last to attract this class in droves, as naive youths acted out a sense of duty and will to prove their masculinity.)

Soon enough, Billy is talking again, and his flashbacks grant the film some of its more harrowing moments, including the event that caused his loss of speech. He begins this account by describing the attack by his troops, "like any other," meaning, "terrible, noisy, suicidal," as he and his men walked directly into a wall of gunfire and explosions. "How did you feel?" asks Rivers. "It was like sex," says Billy. "Exciting and ridiculous."

The movie is good at showing this combination of effects, maintaining both distance and rage (reminiscent of Kubrick's Paths of Glory). The only possible good here is in intentions, which Rivers has in abundance. This makes him feel weak and troubled about his job. At one point he collapses, and is sent on a working vacation to London, where he observes another doctor, who treats trauma with incredibly cruel shock therapy.

And this is the crux of it, the paradox of making men "crazy enough to go back." Serving as our emotional surrogate, Rivers is confused, angry, benevolent and helpless. He sympathizes equally with Sassoon's astute, passionate analysis and Billy's desperate faith in gender and class myths (to be a man, to earn respect, he has to go back).

The title Regeneration refers not only to the "scientific" regeneration of sanity and nerves, but also to the regeneration that cannot occur, the rebuilding of hope, the restoration of order. Throughout, the film offers up several poems and poem fragments to insinuate the costs of violence and faith in war, as the men read their work to one another. But these images, like the movie's beautifully composed visuals, don't do the devastation justice, and this may be Regeneration's most salient and subtle observation. The costs are always too great.

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