MOVIE REVIEW : Olivier Farewell in ‘War Requiem’

Great Britain entered World War I with such widespread naive optimism and experienced such terrible losses on such a personal level that it’s the ideal conflict with which to express anti-war protest.

In 1962, Benjamin Britten composed an oratorio, based on the poetry of World War I soldier Wilfred Owen, to commemorate the new Coventry Cathedral, which had been bombed beyond restoration during World War II. “War Requiem” has now become a remarkably evocative and powerful film in which England’s premier experimentalist, Derek Jarman, has created a flow of images involving tableaux and intercut with archival material to accompany the soaring, majestic oratorio.

(“War Requiem” launches the Monica 4-Plex’s new Monica Premiere Showcase policy, which means that from now on one of the Santa Monica theater’s four screens will be devoted exclusively to limited engagements of specialized films.)

“War Requiem” opens with a World War I veteran (Laurence Olivier, in an elegiac and most fitting screen farewell after six decades on screen) being wheeled in his chair outside a vast, boarded-up Victorian hospital complex. As his nurse pins a row of medals to his sweater, the old soldier, with an expression of infinite sadness, commences remembering long-ago battles. In essence, we’re seeing the film--and therefore, World War I--through Lord Olivier’s haunted eyes. (At the very beginning of the picture, we hear on the sound track Olivier reciting Owen’s “Strange Meeting.”)

What follows are meticulously re-created glimpses of life in a training camp, in the trenches and in a field hospital, all punctuated with clips of actual wartime footage. What emerges is a collective portrait of the British people at their most solicitous, selfless and quietly heroic. Gradually, three principal figures emerge: the dark-haired, mustached Poet--i.e., Owen--(Nathaniel Parker), the Unknown Soldier (ginger-haired Owen Teale) representative of the dead soldiers celebrated in Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” and the Nurse (Tilda Swinton).

Gradually, too, Christian rituals evolve in which both the Poet--Owen was killed at age 25 one week before Armistice--and the Unknown Soldier are equated with the sacrifice of Christ. Parker and Teale serve largely as icons of stalwart Britishers, but it falls to Swinton, in some superb moments of silent acting, to express such capitalized emotions as Grief and Desire.

One of Jarman’s most inspired touches was to move forward to the present in depicting death in battle via film clips. In another context, these clips might well be unbearable, so unsparing are they, but here they are presented with a sense of discretion and dignity that give full force to Jarman’s protest against war. “War Requiem” and its predecessor, “The Last of England,” an apocalyptic, surreal vision of Britain after the fall of government, reflect a deep love of country and its people on the part of Jarman. They also are evidence of a new maturity in a one-time enfant terrible who once was more likely to drive you up the wall--or up the aisle--than to move you with his commanding sense of the visual.