HOPE AND GLORY
Some comments by Kevin Romano
Copyright 1988 Kevin Romano
Having been tremendously impressed by John Boorman's work on THE EMERALD FOREST, I went to see HOPE AND GLORY over the weekend, and, true to the reviews I had read previously, it is a very realistic and convincing evocation of the World War II era in England as seen through the eyes John Boorman -- the child.
There is humor, pathos, tenderness and lots of other endearing virtues to this movie. What there is not is drama.
Even if we don't agree with our imperfect institutions, such as the law, government, the political economy, there are historical reasons why they developed the way they did.
Likewise, in film, the structure of the screenplay has developed through years of experimentation, trial and error, relationships shared with other forms of drama, as well as many other reasons. To challenge such collective wisdom requires the true force of historic genius pushed to an inevitable clash with what has gone before it, and through such a clash is born the advancement of the human race.
However, for me, HOPE AND GLORY is not such an event, even though John Boorman has chosen to challenge them in this film.
The essence of drama is the clash of the human will against obstacles -- the testing of just what it means to be a man or a woman. In this process our human condition is illuminated.
Now it is rather obvious that we share certain things with the animals; physical bodies, a certain level of emotional life etc.; it is equally certain that there are things which we don't share -- things which make us uniquely human. Lest I digress too much, by way of example let me say that I greatly enjoy movies about nature, but for me, for the most part, nature films are unable to create true drama just because they lack this testing, this probing and searching out of the good, the bad and the ugly of the human will.
So too reminiscences -- no matter how wonderful, how evocative, how well-crafted are not drama if they lack this crucial testing and this, I feel, is a major weakness of HOPE AND GLORY. To be sure, it has lots of other virtues, virtues which others have amply pointed out. I offer this merely as something to think about if you haven't already seen the film, or are going to see it again. Both my wife and eleven-year-old daughter liked the film more than I did, so I thought I'd try to put down in words just what it is that bothers me about it.
As film history progresses we will perhaps see the advent of new forms of filmic story-telling. It's an exciting thought. HOPE AND GLORY, however, takes us, in some ways, a step backwards.
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