Ciro Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent and Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge

Some readers of this blog have noticed that I do not usually write about contemporary movies because, as I have said, most of them look as though D.W. Griffith had never lived.  Ciro Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent and Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge are, unfortunately, no exceptions.

Embrace of the Serpent has some beautiful black-and-white cinematography of the endless water and jungle of the Amazon.  Two different scientists of the earlier and later 20th C. are using a shaman to find Yakruna, a sacred psychedelic plant.  Along the way they run into the missionaries and rubber barons who are destroying the indigenous people and their beliefs.  In the end they find the plant and the later scientist ingests it and the movie ends with 2001-like dream images, in color. Ciro Guerra flirts with the idea of the noble savage, but never seems to quite want to embrace it, at times supporting the acquisition of knowledge by the natives. The film reminds me of the books --now somewhat discredited-- that Carlos Castaneda wrote in the 60's and 70's about the Mexican shaman don Juan, encouraging us not to get too hung up on Western rationalism and allow ourselves to enter the spirit world through mushrooms.  Werner Herzog has been mining this kind of material since Fata Morgana in 1971 and I recommend the several movies of his that will be shown on Turner Classic Movies in September.  The "noble savage" myth was well handled by D.W. Griffith in 1909 with The Red Man's View.

Mel Gibson has shown some interest in the idea of the noble savage, particularly in Apocalypco (2006).  What he most seems interested in, however, is pain and suffering as a way to spiritual redemption.  Hacksaw Ridge is something of a remake of Howard Hawks's Sergeant York (1941), both movies about soldiers who, for religious reasons, don't believe in killing.  In Gibson's case it is not clear why Desmond Doss is not immediately granted his wish to be a medic and has to be rescued by his father's WWI general from a court martial.  In any case, he becomes a medic and rescues 75 injured soldiers from the Japanese hordes, winning the medal of honor.  One has not seen such slow-motion violence since the days of Sam Peckinpah and Gibson, like Peckinpah, captures the balletic beauty of violence at Okinawa after a long and tedious depiction of Doss's childhood and courtship of his wife. If one wants to see a depiction of the complexities and contradictions of war I recommend D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation,1915 (the Civil War), King Vidor's The Big Parade,1925 (WWI), Raoul Walsh's Objective Burma and John Ford's They Were Expendable, both 1945 (WWII) and Samuel Fuller's The Steel Helmet, 1951 (Korean War).  Fuller, who fought in WWII,  wrote:  For those lucky enough to survive it, war turned your deepest convictions upside down and inside out.