A struggle can solely go on for thus lengthy earlier than its causes begin to fray on the seams and the individuals who enlisted to struggle on their behalf are pressured to reckon with the essential reality of what they’re truly doing on the market. Few motion pictures this aspect of “The Skinny Purple Line” have been extra attuned to that terrible however clarifying strategy of self-recognition than Roberto Minervini’s “The Damned,” a thinly sketched piece of Civil Warfare reenactment a couple of volunteer unit dispatched to patrol the uncharted borderlands alongside the western territories in the course of the winter of 1862.
They set off as a noble — even heroic — group of peacekeepers within the proud service of a extra excellent union, however after the veil of function began to slide unfastened they had been lowered to a bunch of scraggly Union cosplayers fumbling their method by means of the wilds of Montana seeking something that may resemble a function. Troopers dissemble into anxious fathers and ill-prepared sons, a few of whom are abruptly reminded that they’ve by no means shot something larger than a rabbit earlier than.
Because the climate grows colder and the wagons change into more durable to push up the frozen hills, presumptions of obligation and nationwide pleasure give approach to unresolvable questions regarding religion, masculinity, and forgiveness. “You find yourself realizing that your loved ones is much more vital than your nation,” one of many males sighs to the heavens, as if God hadn’t stopped listening to him someplace round Chicago. When the bullets begin to fly, there’s no telling the place they’re coming from, or who is perhaps pulling the set off. In all probability it’s in all probability simply one other group of terrified strangers who can’t keep in mind what they had been hoping to perform in the course of nowhere, or why anybody ought to must die so removed from residence. A few of these characters would possibly stay to be on the profitable aspect of the struggle, however all of them are irretrievably misplaced.
On second thought, “characters” is much too sturdy a time period for the strolling lifeless who amble by means of “The Damned,” a anonymous assortment of nice faces and weary sighs who play playing cards across the campfire and scan the horizon for something that may kill them. Minervini clings to a few of these individuals extra carefully than others (their ranks are culled after a sudden assault provides this film a short reprieve from the torpor of its idea), however their particular person particulars are largely subsumed into the collective purgatory they share collectively, a pure results of Minervini’s refusal to bend any of his troopers into clear narrative arcs.
Such an strategy has change into de rigueur for a director whose socially aware work usually straddles the Mason-Dixon Line between fiction and documentary in an effort to blur the opposite invisible borders of American life on the identical time. In “The Damned,” as in his “What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fireplace?,” Minervini’s cinema strives to viscerally increase American politics throughout the our bodies of its residents; the troopers on this movie is perhaps 500 miles away from anywhere with a reputation, however they’re nonetheless on the mercy of a rustic that’s in violent disagreement with its personal beliefs.
Right here, the hyper-naturalism of Minervini’s approach is successfully sophisticated by the self-evident falseness of his subject material, and the hand held immediacy of Carlos Alfonso Corral’s shallow focus camerawork helps promote the phantasm that we’re watching snippets of uncooked footage straight from the nineteenth century. So too does the overall lack of scenes, because the film kinds round a hodgepodge of unfastened moments which can be more and more pitched towards despair — particularly within the wake of the frenetic gunfight that underscores the pointlessness of the troopers’ lengthy stroll to nowhere. There’s extra wind than music, and the fragments of dialogue that survive the ultimate edit really feel spied upon quite than scripted.
The one ahead momentum comes from a rising consciousness that the troopers are watching this film together with us, because the sheer inexplicability of their actions on the behest of the U.S. Military begins to distance them from the logic of their very own our bodies. Or in order that they inform us. Whereas Minervini’s grip on the movie’s idea by no means falters, the depths that he’s capable of plumb with it by no means deepen.
Tellingly, “The Damned” solely threatens to change into something greater than a ponderous — if immaculately convincing — Civil Warfare reenactment when Minervini permits his characters to articulate their fading desires of salvation within the clearest attainable phrases. After one of many youthful troopers particulars his simply outlined relationship with God, an older man sweetly replies: “I hope it stays that easy for you.” Later, one other soldier insists that “once you hear a robin, every thing goes to be OK.”
The naivete sticks with you even because the movie round it melts away. For all of its period-specific element, “The Damned” is paradoxically greatest redeemed by the atemporality that Minervini superimposes onto every shot. This was such a younger nation then, however so little has modified in regards to the blind religion we place within the forces that hold us trudging into darkness in opposition to our higher judgment, broadly outlined as these forces is perhaps. By the point “The Damned” arrived at its impenetrably imprecise non-ending, part of me was begging that Minervini would possibly pull an M. Night time Shyamalan and have his characters emerge into the fashionable world. They’d in all probability perceive it in addition to they do their very own.
Grade: C+
“The Damned” premiered on the 2024 Cannes Movie Pageant. It’s at present searching for U.S. distribution.