PASSCHENDAELE
Directed by Paul Gross. Starring Paul Gross, Caroline Dhavernas, Joe Dinicol, Meredith Bailey. Opens Fri, Oct 17.
*1/2

If Passchendaele has one redeeming quality, it’s sincerity. Former TV Mountie and man with broom Paul Gross obviously brought a sincere reverence for the First World War battle that provides his $20-million war movie with its bloody climax. The title refers to the battle on the Belgian plains that was won by the Canadian Corps, a victory that, while short-lived, went a long way towards proving the strength of the Canadian military.

But while Gross may admire that piece of Canadian history, his admiration seems to be blocked by his massive ego, which shines brightly through his shallow, almost ridiculous script. Imagine a B-movie version of Saving Private Ryan crossed with the love story of Pearl Harbor and you’ve got Passchendaele.

Gross plays Sgt. Michael Dunne, a soldier who returns from Calgary after a traumatic tour in Germany which left him moderately wounded. He becomes smitten with hospital nurse Sarah Mann (Caroline Dhavernas) whose asthmatic younger brother David (Joe Dinicol) wants to join the army so his girlfriend’s father will give them consent to marry. The revelation that Mann’s father was a German soldier stirs tensions among the townspeople, including dastardly Brit officer Randolph Dobson-Hughes (Jim Mezon), who connives to have David conscripted. Dunne then follows David back on to the battlefield, where the battle of Passchendaele ensues.

The film is paced very strangely, with the music and emotional beats hitting in a way that leads you to expect a commercial break just around the corner — perhaps a result of Gross being more used to writing for television. The love story has a certain sweetness, but Gross spends far too much time posing with Dhavernas in front of pretty scenery and repeating an incomprehensible metaphor — something about a man on a horse standing over a ridge. It’s all incredibly heavy-handed.

Gross revels in zooming the camera in on every severed limb and fragmentation wound, to the point of being gratuitous, but he loses his nerve when it comes to showing Nurse Sarah overcoming her morphine addiction cold turkey — now, I’m no medical expert, but I think there’s a lot more to this process than shivering a lot and having your lover dab your forehead with a cloth. But Gross has taken care to omit any images of vomiting or diarrhea from his film about harsh wartime realities.

Still, the film deserves credit for the set design. (It’s the work of Carol Spier, who also designs David Cronenberg’s films.) It really is awe-inspiring that Gross managed to turn the Alberta prairies, where the film was shot, into a wet, muddy German field of war. The setting feels visceral and gritty, and the choreography of battle is surprisingly intense, even if you’ll sometimes find yourself thinking you just saw that same soldier being shot out of his trench at a different angle a minute ago.

But Gross throws even that achievement out the window with the film’s coup de grâce, a ridiculous scene involving Dunne carrying a makeshift cross made of trench planks, to which David has been nailed, on his back across the battlefield. I’ve been mulling that image over for days, and I’m still not sure what it’s supposed to convey.

It’s unfortunate, because I’m that $20 million could have gone to a score of more capable Canadian filmmakers — though the way this one turned out, I doubt they’ll get that chance anytime soon.