Sasoon's Regeneration and Saving Private Ryan

The first 200 words of this essay...

REGENERATION

SYNOPSIS

The unfortunately all-too-familiar story, this time, is set during World War I, and is peopled with real characters and places. Siegfried Sassoon, the noted poet and anti-war protestor, is, paradoxically, also a British war hero, laden with medals. One day he simply can stand no more of the senseless killing and writes a letter of protest to the authorities that is widely publicized. Military higher-ups, anxious to have his actually quite sensible protestations taken as the ravings of a shell-shocked madman, have him sent to the military hospital at Craiglockart, Scotland, where he encounters the caring psychiatrist William Rivers. Dr. Rivers has a bevy of "loonies" for patients, each more bizarrely disturbed than the other, but the film focusses on Sassoon and Billy Prior, a working-class man who has become an officer, a feat in classist Britain, but whose horrible experiences in the trenches have caused him to become mute.

British director Gillies MacKinnon has wisely avoided the ultra-realism of Saving Private Ryan (which is also ultra-expensive) in favor of a more visually and aurally symbolic depiction of this especially horrible war which ended up killing nearly 10 million men. More importantly, he has chosen