Testament of Youth (Alicia Vikander, Kit Harington)

[Holmes]

My review -

Testament of Youth, British author Vera Brittain's now-canonical memoir of her life during the First World War, receives an entertaining and stately, if rather dry cinematic adaptation by director James Kent, a prestige-television veteran. Vera, played by Alicia Vikander, rebels against the wishes of her old-fashioned father (Dominic West) and a constrictive, sexist society in general to earn a place at Oxford on the eve of the Great War. After it erupts and draws in the men in her life, including her lover (Kit Harington) and her brother (Taron Egerton), she, too, decides to serve, leaving university to become a nurse.

Kent's adaptation, suitable to be shown in English secondary schools around Remembrance Day, is imperfect. His visual style—often, for example, contrasting almost-too-beautiful shots of flowering trees and seasides with the rain-swept claustrophobia of the trenches—can be predictable, though not unpersuasive. The male characters, intended to represent the tragedy of the war inferno consuming a generation almost in its entirety, are too thinly drawn, blandly handsome and bordering on interchangeable. Kent also contributes to the awful and ongoing trend of typecasting the magnificent Emily Watson as dowdily scolding matriarchs. And yet. And yet! His film contains several powerful individual sequences, melancholy and piercing. The art direction and costume design, intimately conjuring another era, are beyond reproach. And Vikander, rapidly establishing herself as a fresh face on the A list with films such as this and Ex Machina, delivers a poignant, tough, and transfixing performance as Brittain, a turn culminating in a third-act speech (halting at first and then thunderous) enunciating a war-forged vision of pacifism. Her yearning romanticism and subsequent grief ring so true as to elevate the entire film.

B