Under There

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

GALLIPOLI

Directed by Peter Weir Screenplay by David Williamson

They meet as competitors in a provincial track meet. They start to become friends when Archy, the country mouse (Mark Lee), shares his breakfast with Frank, the city ferret (Mel Gibson), who has gone broke betting on himself. That friendship deepens as they trek through the Australian outback to Perth, where the idealistic but underage Archy hopes to find a recruiter who will permit him to fight for someone else's King and country in the Great War.

It is all very pleasant and, as realized by Director Weir, who proved in Picnic at Hanging Rock that he has a gift for empty-space pictorialism, quite handsome. But after the males have been bonded, they must endure separation (Archy gets a good regiment, Frank finds himself in the infantry), and the audience must endure an extended service comedy as the lads train in Egypt, where there are mule jokes, "feelthy" pictures jokes, and the Pyramids at dawn. At times it seems that one can't get to Gallipoli at all from the point at which Weir starts.

Certainly one cannot traverse this banal movie territory and arrive at the essence of the campaign that supplies this film with its title. Historically, Gallipoli was a tragic epic. On this obscure Turkish peninsula, an outpost of empire was required to sacrifice the best and bravest of a generation in an ill-conceived, almost whimsical attempt to break the stalemate in the trenches of Western Europe. But the ground was wrong--too rugged--and the method of attack--an amphibious assault from small boats--entirely untried. The result was a stalemate as deadly as the one in France. All this is ignored by the film, and the lack of context robs it of meaning. Those who haven't boned up recently on military history may well find Gallipoli a puzzling piece. More important, the harshest irony--the contrast between the heroism of the troops and the near criminal absurdity of the enterprise --is lost.

This deafness to overtone is especially disappointing because Weir, in Hanging Rock and The Last Wave, showed himself to be particularly adept at suggesting, with force and economy, the resonances in ordinary-seeming events. Perhaps he was overwhelmed by the scale of this project, for one senses throughout that he is pulling back to the safely particular rather than straining forward toward a more daring grandeur. Well acted and, within its limited terms, well made, Gallipoli represents a failure of nerve as well as design. --By Richard Schickel

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