Young provincial laborer Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield) professes Seventh-day Adventism and rejects violence. His faith forbids him to even touch a weapon. But in the midst of World War II, Desmond decides he can’t sit on the home front while other young men from his town fight. So he voluntarily enlists in the army, and is promised that he will become a field corpsman who doesn’t have to carry a gun. However, the boy’s commanders insist that every soldier must learn to shoot, even though his military job is to rescue the wounded, not to kill Japanese. Desmond has to endure a lot, until he is sent to Okinawa, where he gets a chance to show what he is worth on the battlefield.
The longer Hollywood exists, the less inclined it is to make the main positive heroes fervently believing Christians with a Bible at their hearts and a prayer on their lips. Hollywood knows that such characters annoy a lot of people in America and around the world, so they try not to lose their audience before they’ve even had a taste of the movie. But because zealous Christians exist and they want to watch movies about themselves, America has developed an almost parallel fundamentalist cinema with its own heroes, its own hits, its own favorite subjects.
In 2004, Mel Gibson became a Christian movie hero. His biblical drama “The Passion of the Christ” was aimed at a fundamentalist audience, and Gibson connected to the advertising tape influential pastors and large church congregations. As a result, the picture collected more than 600 million dollars, which made “The Passion” the most profitable movie not in English (remember that the tape was filmed in authentic dialects of the biblical time).
Despite this colossal success, Gibson then did not develop it. This year, however, he again released, if not fundamentalist, then clearly Christian movie, primarily aimed at church audiences.
To be sure, For Conscience is the story of a war hero, not a biblical character or a famous priest. However, the unyielding faith of Desmond Doss (a real person awarded the highest military honor in the United States) is of tremendous importance to the narrative. At first, the modest but determined young man defends his right to serve his country without picking up a rifle, and no mockery of his fellow soldiers and commanders can break him. Although he is overcome by doubts and temptations, the hero stands his ground.
When Desmond finds himself on the battlefield, however, prayer sustains him during an astounding feat that we won’t detail so as not to spoil the surprise. Doss doesn’t preach his faith and even prays often to himself, but his actions speak louder than words. And the essence of his feat is saving lives, not the usual war heroic killing. One can agree or disagree with Desmond’s philosophy – by the way, the picture offers convincing and sensible arguments in favor of why a field corpsman should be able to shoot – but it is impossible to deny the guy’s spiritual strength and incredible courage.
The first part of the picture is standard for this kind of films, and the jogging under the shouts of a sergeant from the training school, night beatings, cleaning toilets and other delights of preparation for war are not particularly exciting. As well as template pictures from the personal life of a guy (the hero has a nice girl and an alcoholic father). But when Desmond and his company find themselves in Okinawa and begin to storm an impregnable mountain ridge, the audience understands why “Conscientious Objection” received high marks in the West.
Remember the famous Normandy landing scene in “Saving Private Ryan”, which is so powerful that it undermines the entire subsequent narrative? Mel Gibson filmed an even more terrible and merciless war – a real meat grinder in which the Americans and Japanese grind each other with bullets, grenades, flamethrowers, bayonets, knives and even bare hands. They’re fighting over a lifeless mountain, but it’s of strategic importance, and that’s enough to literally pelt each other with corpses day in and day out. “War is hell” – few pictures can be found that convey this thought so lucidly and bloodily to the audience.
It would seem that such battles should burn everything human out of people, turn their souls into smoking hulks like the one that smokes in the head of Doss Senior, who lost his best friends during the First World War and never came to terms with the loss. But Desmond remains human, and that is his greatest, most incredible achievement. Just as Gibson’s main achievement as a director is how skillfully he juxtaposes the nightmare of war with its pathos, madness with nobility, cruelty with soulfulness and a touch of humor, inner feelings with external trials.
