Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge spends two hours insisting that Desmond Doss will not touch a rifle, then sends him up a cliff into the worst of the Pacific war without one. The contradiction is the whole movie, and it is a good one.
Trailer, via Lionsgate Movies.
A Medic Who Would Not Carry a Weapon
Hacksaw Ridge is a 2016 war film directed by Mel Gibson and written by Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight. Andrew Garfield plays Desmond Doss, a Seventh-day Adventist from Lynchburg, Virginia, who enlists in the United States Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor to serve as a combat medic. Doss refuses to use a weapon of any kind. He became the first conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor, for his service during the Battle of Okinawa.
The film runs 139 minutes. It is based on the 2004 documentary The Conscientious Objector. Filming took place in Australia from September to December 2015.
The tagline sells the premise flat: “One of the greatest heroes in American history never fired a bullet.” That line is not marketing spin here. It is the plot.
Basic Training With the 77th
The first half of Hacksaw Ridge is a courtroom drama that has not found its courtroom yet. Doss lands in basic training with the 77th Infantry Division under Sergeant Howell, played by Vince Vaughn. He excels physically. He also becomes a pariah among his fellow soldiers for refusing to handle a rifle or train on Saturdays.
Howell and Captain Glover, played by Sam Worthington, try to discharge him for psychiatric reasons under Section 8. The attempt is overruled, because Doss’s religious beliefs do not constitute mental illness. They then try grueling labor tasks to drive him out.
After fellow soldiers beat him one night, Doss refuses to identify his attackers. That refusal earns their respect. It is the film’s cleanest piece of character writing, and it does not need a speech to land.
A Court-Martial and a Letter From His Father
The unit gets leave after basic training. Doss intends to marry Dorothy Schutte, the nurse he met before the war, played by Teresa Palmer. His refusal to carry a firearm instead leads to an arrest for insubordination. He is charged, pleads not guilty at his court-martial, and is found guilty.
Glover and Dorothy visit him in jail and urge him to plead guilty so he can be released without charge. He refuses to compromise his beliefs.
Before sentence can be pronounced, his father Tom — Hugo Weaving, a World War I veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder — bursts into the tribunal with a letter from his former commanding officer, now a brigadier general. The letter concerns his son. Gibson stages the rescue as a family wound finally closing, not as a legal technicality.
What the Cast Carries
The supporting cast does the load-bearing work in the film’s first half. The names matter:
- Sam Worthington as Captain Glover
- Vince Vaughn as Sergeant Howell
- Teresa Palmer as Dorothy Schutte
- Luke Bracey as Smitty Ryker
- Hugo Weaving as Tom Doss
- Rachel Griffiths as Bertha Doss
- Ryan Corr as Lieutenant Manville
- Richard Roxburgh as Colonel Stelzer
Vaughn is the surprise. He plays Howell as a drill instructor who is cruel because the job requires it, and the film lets him be right about Doss’s danger without letting him be right about Doss’s character. Weaving has the harder assignment: a father who is deeply upset by his son’s decision to enlist, and the film does not ask you to forgive him.
Garfield is the reason any of it holds. He had high regard for Doss, calling him a “wonderful symbol of embodying the idea of live and let live no matter what your ideology is, no matter what your value system is, just to allow other people to be who they are and allow yourself to be who you are.” Garfield said he cried the first time he read the screenplay. He visited Doss’s hometown and touched his tools. Gibson was drawn to him after seeing The Social Network.
Garfield had played Spider-Man in The Amazing Spider-Man and its sequel. He has said the idea of playing a real superhero was more inspiring. That is a good line, and Hacksaw Ridge mostly earns it.
The Battle of Okinawa
The second half moves to Okinawa and becomes something else entirely. The violence is loud, close and unrelenting. Gibson has never been subtle about bodies, and he is not subtle here.
What matters is that Doss goes up the ridge without a weapon and stays. The film’s argument is not that war is good, or that Doss was naive. It is that a man who would not kill was still willing to stand where killing was happening. That is a harder position to dramatize than either pacifism or patriotism, and the film knows it.
The battle scenes are also where Hacksaw Ridge gets closest to losing its own point. The camera loves the chaos. When the film cuts back to Doss pulling men off the ridge, the contrast restores it. But the balance tips toward spectacle more than once, and the film’s quietest scenes are its best ones.
A Return to Form, and What It Costs
Hacksaw Ridge premiered at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival on September 4, 2016, and was released in the United States on November 4 by Summit Entertainment through Lionsgate Films. It grossed over $180 million worldwide and received critical acclaim, with Gibson’s direction and Garfield’s performance drawing particular praise.
It was widely viewed as a return to form for Gibson, whose career had been in decline following several controversies. Both the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute named it one of their top ten films of 2016. At the 89th Academy Awards it received six nominations, including Best Picture, and won for Best Sound Mixing and Best Film Editing. It also received three Golden Globe nominations.
That awards record is real, and it is also the least interesting thing about the film. The Oscars rewarded the craft — the sound, the cutting — which is exactly the part of Hacksaw Ridge that would work in any war movie. The part that would not is Garfield’s Doss, a man who pleads not guilty, gets convicted, and goes to war anyway.
The film’s weakness is that it trusts the battle sequences to carry an argument the script already made better in a jail cell. The film’s strength is that it never once makes Doss’s faith a punchline. He is not a fool and he is not a saint. He is a man with a rule, and the movie is about what the rule costs him and everyone around him.
What the Film Gets Right
Hacksaw Ridge is a sincere film that occasionally mistakes volume for conviction. The first half is a better movie than the second, which is an odd thing to say about a war picture, but it is true here. The court-martial, the jail visit, the beating he refuses to avenge — those scenes do the work that the ridge is supposed to finish.
What holds it together is Garfield. He plays Doss without irony, which is the only way the role works. A wink would kill it. He does not wink.
Gibson’s direction is competent and sometimes more than that, but the film’s moral center is not his. It belongs to the man who would not pick up the rifle, and the movie is smart enough to know it.
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