Paul Gross’ ambitious campaign to create a bona fide romantic war epic for his homeland is not just noble but downright exciting for those of us who long for Anglophone Canadians to pay more attention to their own movies. But Passchendaele doesn’t get the right balance of elements. Instead, it’s stuffed with so much hokey melodrama, homily-ridden dialogue and glossy, tourism-ad shots of Albertan scenery that there’s not enough room to provide a fuller sense of the experience or significance of Canadian soldiers’ efforts at the titular WWI battle.
Gross plays Michael, a shell-shocked soldier who recovers in Calgary before shipping out again to protect the brother of the woman he loves (Caroline Dhavernas). Due to the broad-strokes narrative and abundance of one-note characters, the scenes on the home front can be a slog but at least the foothills look pretty. The long-in-the-coming battle sequences are appropriately harrowing but they too are stymied by an ill-judged romantic scene — lighting lovers with mortar fire is a bit much — and a last-minute stab at casting the whole tale as a religious allegory. In the process of designing Passchendaele to have the widest possible appeal, Gross fails to give his epic the shape and scope it needs.