Private Peaceful, Cert 12A, 103 mins - review

Beautiful film of two brothers blighted by war, love and loss based on a children's novel by Michael Morpurgo
PRIVATE PEACEFUL film
12 October 2012

Ridiculous though it would be to do so, if you were to compare this adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s children’s novel of the same name with Steven Spielberg’s grandiose and sentimental version of the author’s more famous War Horse, you’d likely prefer this more intimate British period piece.

Private Peaceful (George MacKay), accused of disobeying orders on the Western Front, reviews his life in flashback before facing the firing squad. He is one of two brothers (Jack O’Connell is the elder) who work for a pittance on land owned by a patriotic ex-colonel (Richard Griffiths). They are the sons of a forester who dies in a tree-felling accident that the younger brother believes is his fault.

The colonel is a member of the old order, the brothers are part of the new, questioning the absolute entitlement of the gentry. They both fall for the same girl (Alexandra Roach), and the elder brother, Big Joe, gets her pregnant, which makes him less inclined to volunteer for the war. They are married by the local clergyman who refuses to ring the bells for them. When Joe eventually goes to war, it is as much to protect Thomas, his more timid sibling, as it is to fight the Hun.

If Morpurgo wrote his book for young people, using broad strokes to announce both its social themes and its hatred of an inhumane and costly war, O’Connor seems to have made his film go a bit beyond the telling of “the brutal truth” to the uninitiated, keeping it beautifully in period throughout.

MacKay and O’Connell are both outstanding, as is Maxime Peake as their long-suffering but brave mother, while Griffiths makes you laugh and shudder at the pompous colonel, just the right side of caricature.

The early sequences of a hard country life, dominated by landowners circa 1900, are achieved without the usual pastoral glow, and the war scenes in the trenches, given the constraints of the budget, are painted with proper force. It’s true that we’ve been here before but few other cinematic efforts are so well constructed and shrewdly characterised right down to the smaller parts (praise should go to Simon Reade’s shrewd screenplay).

Essentially conventional in his approach, director Pat O’Connor has delivered a mostly faithful and moving account of Morpurgo’s fine book.

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