Regeneration Reviews

This film, about war's toll on the mind, is fraught with good intentions but falls short of provoking the emotional response and the moral outrage that seem to be its object. Worse, it comes on the heels of Spielberg's monumental SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, and its battle scenes share that film's mud-encrusted palette, if not its kinetic energy. Based on Pat Barker's acclaimed novel, itself part of a trilogy about World War I, it begins in 1917 with poet and war hero Siegfried Sassoon's (James Wilby) stint in a military hospital for shell-shocked soldiers. Sassoon, a highly decorated and unquestionably brave soldier, is sent to Craiglockart not because he's mentally ill, but because he wrote a very public declaration against the war. Dr. Rivers (Jonathan Pryce), a follower of Freud's, is assigned to treat Sassoon and to make him change his stance on the war. Rivers' other patients include Billy Prior (Jonny Lee Miller) a bitter lower-class officer who's mute as the result of the mental trauma he suffered on the front, and Wilfred Owen (Stuart Bunce), a shy poet who admires Sassoon. The friendship between Owen and Sassoon, steeped in the pair's poetry, comes off as stagy, while Prior's struggles with Rivers and his romance with a local girl are more engaging. Despite the chilling battle scenes, which emphasize death's awful stillness, the bulk of the film is talky and preaches to the converted.