It’s hard to take an auteurist approach to Gillies MacKinnon’s Regeneration, which is occasionally beautiful but almost deliberately uncinematic. This is a WWI film that takes place almost entirely at the Craiglockhart War Hospital, where everything traditionally cinematic is a searing, devastating flashback that can only be approached in fits and starts; focusing on the process and moral dilemmas of trauma recovery means relying on the writing and the performances, both of which are delicately crafted and uniformly superb. This is a thoughtful, wrenching work, and I admire MacKinnon’s willingness to step back and let it work on its own terms.
The film–based on the novel by Pat Barker, which is itself mostly based on real history and real people–concentrates on a handful of characters. There’s Siegfried Sassoon (James Wilby), shining and charismatic and already a celebrated poet, a courageous and caring officer who has written a letter denouncing the war, a statement that the higher-ups are eager for him to recant … though in a pinch, they’ll settle for discrediting him. His puppy-eyed admirer and protégé is budding poet Wilfred Owen (Stuart Bunce). (The film makes especially moving use of Owen’s poems.) Also in residence at Craiglockhart is working-class officer Billy Prior (Jonny Lee Miller), whose anger forms a brittle protective shell over his deeply felt vulnerability and empathy. He’s the only primary character who is completely fictional.
All of them are under the care of Dr. William Rivers (Jonathan Pryce), who is steadily fraying under his own self-imposed pressure to give his patients a bottomless reserve of compassion and understanding. This has to be one of the top candidates for Pryce’s all-time best performance.
The movie is quiet, with the plot–such as it is–following several slow processes: the initially mute Prior’s healing, Sassoon’s efforts to understand and live out the demands of his conscience, Owen’s embrace of his poetry and his own genius, and Rivers’s gradual erosion (“I’m getting shell-shocked by my patients,” he says at one point). None of these processes are ever quite complete. The film is full of dilemmas that can’t be resolved with any kind of moral purity. Rivers is healing men who–with good reason–come to think the world of him, but he’s acutely aware that he’s sending them back to the front. In trying to speak out for the men under his command, Sassoon–a diligent and caring leader–has wound up separated from his platoon, stuck in a kind of tainted, unwanted safety.
It’s a small-scale film with enormous, unsolvable concerns, and it’s about goodness and good intentions in a way that feels resonant and complex: not hopepunk (thank God), and perhaps not even all that hopeful, but poignant and genuine.
Regeneration is streaming free on Amazon Prime and Tubi.
