Journey's End

Journey’s End is a compelling, unsentimental ensemble piece in which a group of seriously shell-shocked British officers and men await the brunt of an expected major German offensive in a forward trench.

The film is based on a 1929 play by R.C. (Robert Cedric) Sherriff, a screenwriter who had served three years as an infantry officer on the Western Front. Sherriff followed the play with a novel of the same title a year later. (Sherriff later won an Academy Award for his 1939 screenplay Goodbye, Mr. Chips.)

This is a war movie set in the darkest heart of the First World War, but there are few heroics and little derring-do. This infantry company of emotionally shattered men is led by officers equally as distressed, who know that empathy and emotional strength is the only way to keep the unit together and to try to keep their men and themselves alive, despite how broken they feel inside. 

Sam Claflin as Captain Stanhope in Journey's End

C Company is led by Military Cross recipients Captain Stanhope (Sam Claflin) and Lieutenant Osborne (Paul Bettany), his executive officer, because they are best able to hold themselves and their unit together emotionally. Osborne clearly learned more about leading men from his background as a former schoolmaster, elite rugby player and father than from training the Army provided.

Paul Bettany as Lieutenant Osborne in Journey's End

The dramatic device that makes this narrative gel is that we witness the action mainly through the eyes of a bright, fresh-faced boy lieutenant eager to prove his mettle on the battlefield. Filled with Victorian vim and vigor, Second Lieutenant Raleigh (Asa Butterfield) is a teenaged school-leaver with rudimentary ‘officer training’—‘eight weeks on Salisbury Plain’ and ‘the Corps’ at school, he reports—who has requested to join the unit of an older former schoolmate he admires.


Asa Butterfield as Second Lieutenant Raleigh in Journey's End

The older ‘boy’ is Stanhope, worshipped at home for his Military Cross received for heroism in the capture of Vimy Ridge in 1917. Stanhope, who has a connection with Raleigh’s sister, Margaret—the novel gives the three a history of growing up and summering together in Sussex—told Raleigh to ‘look him up’ if he ever got over to France. But he is horrified to the point of anger when the worshipful boy shows up in his trench at this moment.

We are told that under the general order, each company served on the line six days per month. That may not sound like much. However, it is critical to note that the madness called the Western Front did not advance more than 20 miles in either direction, despite four years of intense fighting and millions of deaths. Both sides’ artillery consistently pounding the same places levelled what had been a region of abundant French farms and villages into a barren mud lagoon of stripped trees and death. 

This story takes place during five days in March 1918 in a trench in the middle of this quagmire, at the distance of ‘about the width of a rugby field’ from the German trenches. Stanhope’s company is sent into the line on 18 March. The long-anticipated German offensive is expected to come on 21 March. As C Company heads in, the unit they are relieving is bringing away everything they can carry. Company C arrives at what had been a French trench—the French army mutinied the summer before—in a nearly indefensible condition.

C Company going into the line on 18 March 1918 in Journey's End 

And then on 19 March ‘The Colonel’ (Robert Glenister) orders what Stanhope knows to be a pointless daylight raid the next day. Stanhope’s men are to raid the German trenches under cover of smoke to snatch a German soldier to try to get intelligence about the anticipated offensive.

 

The rest—the whole story—needs to be seen to be believed.

Two hundred reenactors were used and every detail down to the uniform braiding and military customs and courtesies looks meticulously authentic. There are older men in the company, such as Private Mason (Toby Jones), the officers’ orderly, and Second Lieutenant Trotter (Stephen Graham), but rather than the middle-aged men one sees in ‘war movies’ in roles that are properly younger, the ‘older’ men such as Osborne and the Sergeant Major (Andy Gathergood), look like young men aged by the horror of war.   

Tom Sturridge as Second Lieutenant Hibbert in Journey's End

Journey’s End is one of two outstanding recent war movies, less about the shooting than the men doing the fighting, which speak for the toll the two world wars took on Great Britain in particular. It is notable for taking on the subject of ‘shell shock’—post-traumatic stress disorder—in a direct and unsentimental way.

The other movie is Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017), particularly the narrative of the father (Mark Rylance) and two sons taking the family pleasure boat to pick up evacuees. These stories are neither weepy nor inspiring. They show the effect of a moment of war on individuals, and they stay with one.

Journey’s End 2017 U.K. (107 minutes) directed by Saul Dibb; screenplay by Simon Reade based on the play by R.C. Sherriff and novel by Sherriff and Vernon Bartlett; director of photography Laurie Rose; casting by John Hubbard; music by Hildur Gudnadóttir.