7 / 10
Passchendaele is Paul Gross’s labor of love about the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917. He wrote it, directed it, produced it, and starred in it. The project was inspired by stories his grandfather told him about fighting in the mud of Belgium. It cost twenty million dollars. That made it one of the most expensive Canadian films ever produced. The result is two-thirds of a great war film and one-third of a frustrating romance.
Gross plays Sergeant Michael Dunne, a Canadian veteran of Vimy Ridge sent home with combat fatigue. He works in a Calgary recruiting office. He falls for a morphine-addicted nurse, played by Caroline Dhavernas. Her teenage brother enlists. Dunne re-enlists to keep an eye on him. Everyone ends up in Belgium in October 1917, the worst place anyone could be.
The Battle Scenes
The Passchendaele sequences are excellent. Gross recreated the mud, the duckboards, and the impossible terrain accurately. The actual battle was fought across a flooded landscape so deep in mud that wounded men drowned in shell holes. The film shows this. The crucifix sequence, in which a wounded soldier hangs on a wooden cross-shaped trench frame, is haunting and based on real soldier accounts.
The third act battle is among the best Canadian war footage ever filmed. Real production money went into it and you can see every dollar.
For Writers
Gross got the mud right because the mud was the battle. Most Western Front films stylize the terrain because pure mud is visually monotonous. Gross trusted the monotony. The flatness, the lack of cover, the gray water filling every shell hole. The lesson is that the dominant physical condition of a place is often the dominant emotional condition of the story set there. Don’t look for ways to make it visually varied if the truth is that it was relentless.
The Romance Problem
The romance plot is where the film loses its audience. Gross is fifty when he plays the role. Dhavernas is twenty-nine and plays younger. Their chemistry is technical instead of felt. The morphine subplot is set up and then dropped. The brother’s storyline is signposted from the first reel. None of it’s the texture of the battlefield material.
You can see the shape Gross wanted, something like a Canadian Cold Mountain. He wanted the home-front and the war-front to mirror each other. The mirror doesn’t hold up because the home-front material doesn’t earn its weight.
For Writers
If you intercut two plot lines, both have to carry their own weight. The weaker line cannot ride on the stronger one. Passchendaele’s battlefield material is better than its romance material, and the structure of the film forces them into parity. The result is that every cut back to Calgary feels like a delay. The lesson is to balance the strength of parallel narratives before locking them into a structure that requires them to be equal partners.
The Cost
Twenty million Canadian dollars was a fortune for the industry. The film recovered some of it domestically but didn’t travel well internationally. Critics outside Canada called it sentimental. Critics inside Canada split. Canadian audiences mostly liked it. The cost of the production meant that no comparable Canadian war film has been attempted since.
For Writers
A passion project carries different stakes than a commercial project. Paul Gross spent a decade developing Passchendaele because his grandfather fought there. He’d to make it. Whether it succeeded commercially was secondary. The risk of the passion project is that the writer cannot see what’s not working because the entire story matters to them. The friend who tells you the romance is dragging is the most valuable person in your circle. Find them. Listen.
Craft Note
Paul Gross wrote, directed, produced, and starred. Caroline Dhavernas played Sarah Mann. Joe Dinicol played David Mann. Based on Gross’s grandfather’s experiences at the Third Battle of Ypres, October 1917. Twenty million Canadian dollar budget, the largest in Canadian film history at the time. Released October 2008. Mixed international reception, modest domestic success.
Is Passchendaele worth watching?
7/10. The battle sequences are first-rate Canadian filmmaking. The romance drags. Watch it for the Passchendaele material, which no other film has covered with this much commitment. Fast-forward through the Calgary scenes if you must.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Craft Behind It
This film appears on one of my film lists