Testament of Youth *** (2014, Alicia Vikander, Kit Harington, Taron Egerton, Hayley Atwell) – Movie Review

Alicia Vikander plays Edwardian British heroine Vera Brittain, who recalls her tempestuous coming of age during World War One in director James Kent’s film version of Vera Brittain’s great memoir of how the First World War affected her and the rest of the nation. Alas, though the film is honourable, conscientious and involving, it is also mild, low-impact and cramped-feeling.

In pre-war 1914 England, Vera Brittain strides the landscape as a bright, determined and slightly wilful woman with aspirations of not just becoming the traditional young married wife and mother of the day but a fiercely independent woman who battles to be educated at Oxford University and makes her own life choices.

Along with her brother Edward (Taron Egerton) and his two friends Victor Richardson (Colin Morgan) and Geoffrey Thurlow (Jonathan Bailey), Vera enjoys her idyllic, privileged youth growing up in a middle class family in her rural Derbyshire village at home with her parents (Dominic West and Emily Watson). Her life seems to be a constant fight with her father to be allowed to go to university like her brother. But dad eventually caves in. On route to Oxford University, she is introduced to her brother’s close friend Roland Leighton (Kit Harington), and they soon start a relationship and he becomes her fiancé.

Then suddenly the Great War breaks out, throws the whole of society into turmoil and everything changes for ever. Vera goes to university but all her menfolk, brothers and friends join up to fight the Germans.

[Spoiler alert] By 1916 all her menfolk are dead, including her dear brother and fiancé. A vitally concerned Vera is determined to help the troops and annoys her stern but kindly tutor Miss Lorimer (Miranda Richardson) by giving up her studies at Oxford University and volunteering to sign up to serve as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in London, and working just behind the front lines in field hospitals in France and Belgium.

Vera is appalled by suffering of the men she is trying to look after and gets to be one of the few nurses who look after German casualties. It is a devastating, unforgettable experience, and prompts her later to become a pacifist, a feminist and a writer as the chronicle of the  pain and heartache of that now almost vanished generation.

It’s a great and important, pioneering, raw real-life story but I’m afraid it’s easy to damn this film of Testament of Youth with only faint praise. The movie is interesting, informative and very watchable but it doesn’t really have the emotional or intellectual impact or backbone this story truly needs. A dark soul is required in what’s essentially a depressing portrait of a lost generation, but what we have here is an attractive, largely upbeat period piece and love story. Though the film has very decent production values and looks good, it never escapes its origins as a TV film project. Like the film, the acting is decent but not outstanding.

Vikander replaced Saoirse Ronan, who was originally cast as Vera but had to drop out through scheduling conflicts. Vikander is attractive, brisk and efficient, but no more, and that’s not quite enough. Harington doesn’t make much headway as Roland but it’s a passive love-interest role that doesn’t require much other than looking handsome, which he does. And anyway, the film isn’t about him or the other menfolk.

Dominic West and Emily Watson play Vera’s parents, both not making much impression in unrewarding, small cliched roles. A few years back Watson would have had the Vera part, and would have really done something with it. The talented Richardson doesn’t his the right notes as Miss Lorimer, making her a caricature. These stalwart Brit actors seem somehow stranded, cramped by the meagre writing of their roles.

The film reminded me of The Invisible Woman from 2013, another period product from BBC Films. It has the same feel about it, well crafted but insufficiently vigorous and rousing. Maybe shooting the First War sequences in sepia, for example, might have helped. Maybe using extensive newsreel and documentary footage might have helped.

Some fresh take is needed on vintage material that already has a classic BBC version of 1979 with five episodes with Cheryl Campbell as Vera. It enjoyed a 275 minute running time to make its mark, and this has only 129 minutes to work. It’s an epic story, why not film it as an epic?

The BBC Films development of Testament of Youth was supported by British politician Shirley Williams, Brittain’s daughter, and by Mark Bostridge, Brittain’s biographer, editor, and one of her literary executors, who was acting as consultant on the film.

The film was shot on locations in Yorkshire, Oxford and London. The railway station scenes, train interiors and railway café scene were shot at Keighley Station, using trains from the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway. The landscape shots of period trains were filmed at the heritage track of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway.

The Welbeck Estate in Nottinghamshire provided several locations, including for scenes at Uppingham School, Melrose House and the Etaples Field Hospital. The lake scenes were filmed in Darley Dale in Derbyshire. Merton Street, Oxford, was used for street scenes. The Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, London, was used for the 1918 Armistice Day crowd scene.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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