Tropic Sprockets / Hacksaw Ridge

By Ian Brockway

From the infamous actor/director Mel Gibson comes what could arguably be his smartest, most accurate and most personal film. “Hacksaw Ridge” is the true story of Desmond Doss, the first and still only conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor. During WWII Doss personally saved over 75 lives as an army medic.

Doss (Andrew Garfield) lives in a small Virginia town. Walking along the street, Doss sees a man trapped under a car. The man’s leg is gorily injured. While helping him at the hospital he meets the beautiful and subtly sexy nurse Dorothy (Teresa Palmer) and Doss is over the moon. Just one movie is all it takes, it seems, and the two begin a courtship.

Seeing images of Pearl Harbor and Nazis throw Doss into a tormented whirl which is exacerbated by his violent alcoholic father—the one aspect that is reportedly fictional—played by the actor Hugo Weaving, who is known for taking unusual roles.

Doss vows to be a medic instead of a soldier, because in his service to God as a  Seventh Day Adventist, he has no right to kill another man, according to the Ten Commandments. As he says in the film, in a world that is torn apart, it is “not so wrong of me to want to put a little bit of it back together.”

Fans of “Mad Mel” will not be disappointed, There is plenty of violence and religious guilt depicted. Doss is brought to near self-flaggelation, given that no one gives his nonviolent position credit or viability, be they in the military or otherwise. Desmond Doss shows a teeth-gnashing anguish that only Kafka or Christ himself could appreciate and indeed Doss is portrayed in several scenes awash and scorched with black blood or alone in his cell, glistening with sweat with the light of heaven streaming in from the window, much like Jesus.

Gibson’s medieval obsessions with gore and suffering in the tradition of Matthias Grünewald or the devilish manifestations of Gustave Dore are well in force. Immense fields of Japanese men are burned alive. US soldiers are disemboweled, decapitated or shot through the skull with the bullets clearly in view exiting many a head. The flailing and tumbling bodies make a dreary dance, a grotesque and barbaric ballet that our civilization sanctions again and again, until we become blank and jaded.

Despite the gushes of gore which also remind one of EC Comics “Tales of the Crypt,” with maggots seeming to re-animate dead flesh and scores of rats feasting on entrails, this film is a departure of sorts. Doss is one of the few Gibson protagonists who does not resort to violence, though temptation along with sadness is everywhere. There is even a quick shot of a burned man who much resembles Gibson’s own role in “The Man Without a Face,” as if to show that meekness is something holy and to illuminate Doss’s calling. Like Jesus, Doss refutes violence again and again. He proves as radical in healing as most servicemen are with a gun.

Gibson’s glossy war vision also has a glamour that recalls the old Hollywood of John Ford. Teresa Palmer’s face shines in satin tones. Her lipstick is shaped perfectly in Valentine tints. She is the light of a spiritual sun that will shield her lover in his pacifist war. She is the one who gives Desmond a Bible and in one scene she is shown with her face pulling away, her chin downward, her right eye betraying a tear, very like the Virgin Mary.

Yet though Christianity is important to Gibson, he only introduces the concept as it relates to Doss. It is who and what Doss is that makes the man. Gibson does not overly press an agenda. More than any Mel Gibson film, “Hacksaw Ridge” illustrates a brave and sensitive nonviolent man for simply what he is, a man. By using the heroic conventions employed in past films from George Stevens to Spielberg, Gibson entertains us with great gusto. Better yet, the often overzealous director shows a refreshing accessibility in simply sticking to his story, giving a non-supernatural and very mortal hero, within whom we can perhaps, see ourselves.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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