Band of Brothers - Breaking Point

[shipperx]

In general I'm really everything but a war movie fan. In general I'm just not into them. That said, I've adored "Band of Brothers" since the first time I saw the mini-series and I have a tendency to re-watch when it replays on Sunday mornings on The History Channel.

There must be a marathon going on this morning because they've played several episodes in a row, one of which was "The Breaking Point," which, I think, is my favorite episode in the series. It never fails to terrify me and to make me cry. So many of the men that the series followed are maimed, killed, or driven crazy in that episode. Because it's so far along into the series (episode 7), the men were not just faces in the crowd, but men who had carried the weight of the series. For that reason, it bears a tremendous emotional punch every, single time. The horror of Toy realizing that his leg had been blown off and that he's still out in the open during the shelling. Guarnere going after Toy, another barrage hitting, and both Guarnere and Toy hit simultaneously, with Guarnere also having his own leg blown off. Compton, witnessing this, just... losing it, unable to deal with what happened to his friends.

Donnie Wahlberg, as the sergeant given a battle commission and promoted to being an officer in the wake of the Battle of Bastogne, gives a strong performance as the central man in the episode ( 'Band of Brothers' tends to rotate which character is the POV character, and "Breaking Point" is his character's episode. ...And I feel really odd referring to them as characters since they were real men, and those who were still alive at the time of filming were interviewed at the beginning and end of each episode). Still, the episode manages to convey the hell -- physical and emotional-- they were in. Out in the open, trapped in foxholes, and not even allowed fires, they sleep outside in the snow. They are constantly shelled throughout the episode. They can't get away. They can go nowhere, and these is no help. Whether they lived or died was just the luck of where the shell fell, little wonder it emotionally decimated men.

Wahlberg's Lipton is left in the position of having to keep up morale and bolster support for their totally ineffective platoon leader, Lt. Dike, even when he also believes that Dike is a terrible soldier. He even goes to Captain Winters to complain, something he says that he could never imagine doing, even though he knows that Winters can do nothing about Dike. Later in the episode, Dike is so ineffective that he is clearly getting soldiers killed, and Winters, who wishes to take back the company he was promoted out of being in charge of, is desperate to find someone to lead the men, leading to his assigning Speirs as platoon leader. Speirs, in the series is a bit of a shadowy character who may have done some bad things, with the troops constantly spreading rumors (did he really give cigarettes to Nazi POWs then murder them? Was it 5 prisoners? 10? 30? Did he really shoot a subordinate for being drunk on duty?, etc) Soldiers fear Speirs, and yet when he's showing what is either craziness or uncommon valor in fighting (it's debatable which. Spears tells one soldier in the series that the trick is to remember that they're already dead, so his heroism comes from a pretty fatalistic place) inspires respect in the men. He also is shown to be smart in the way he leads men, careful in his battle choices, and not willing to ask a subordinate to do anything that he wouldn't do himself. When, by the end of the episode, Speirs is given Dike's job, it is seen as a good thing. (And when he signs on for another tour of duty at the end of the series, it's also shown as a good thing. He has some shady aspects, but he's eventually shown as an good man and an excellent leader in war).

The worst scene in the episode is the one where, during the shelling, a soldier is caught in the open. Two of his pals are in a fox hole screaming for him to make it to them, to make it to cover. Just when he's made it to within yards of them, a shell falls... killing the pair in the fox hole right in front of his eyes. That was where he had been going to escape the shelling and they had died, and they were his friends. They had been obliterated before his eyes. He stands up and starts running, screaming, as shells fall. . . and it's powerful because it is so very, emotionally true.

Anyway, for all its darkness and horror (and for all that I dislike war movies), I highly recommend "Band of Brothers" and, really, "The Breaking Point" remains my favorite episode of the series.

Comments

[thedabara-cds.livejournal.com]

Wow, this sounds really good, in a very terrifying way. I'm definately going to have to check this series out!

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

It's definitely worth watching. It's the true account of Company E of the 101st Airborne Division. It follows them from training before D-Day, through D-Day, all the way through to the end of the war. This poor division was in the forefront of the war throughout the entire war and so were involved through nearly all of the well known battles in the war from Normandy to Battle of the Bulge, through even taking Hitler's vacation home in the mountains. Another episode that always makes me cry is the one where they walk up on a Concentration camp and initially cannot figure out what it is, because, who really could have imagined something like that? The Nazis had abandonned the camp just hours before they arrived and the only soldier in the platoon who speaks German is an American Jew of German descent and having to translate, realising who these people are and what has happened to them, just devestates him.

I found it to be a well written, well acted series.

[meko00.livejournal.com]

I've been meaning to watch this series for a while; rented it about 1½ years ago when I was feeling poorly, but only managed to watch part of the first ep, which I liked very much, before I had to return it. Though, I bought the DVDs. It's just... such a project, you know? Need to be in the right headspeace and all that...

Also, I'll check out that link you gave me. Must keep that in mind...

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I do recommend watching it. It's very well done, I thought. It's not gung-ho battles, it's really about the men and what they went through.

[wisemack.livejournal.com]

Good review, Lisa. And like you, I'm not particularly fond of war movies, possibly because I burnt out on 'em at a very early age. (Early 50s, Friday night at the movies, usually war films with planes flying around and shooting at each other. Boooo-ring!)

But Band of Brothers was exceptional, and I think the interviews, as you pointed out, made it all the more harrowing. These things really happened to THESE MEN - it's not a fable, not a tall tale, it is real and this is a bit of how it all went down.

My experience with WWII vets (and WWI, as well) is that they just don't talk about their experiences. Well, okay, they sometimes share the funny stuff - but not the serious. And I knew quite a few of them, because although my dad didn't serve in the European Theatre, a number of his cronies did - the men of Company B, 106th Engineer (Combat) Battalion, 31st Infantry (Dixie) Division, Mississippi National Guard. These young men were used to cadre outfits all over the world, and one recently deceased member of the group was even Gen. Patton's driver after D-Day! I loved these guys, and revered their courage and tried to get them to talk to me. But they DID NOT SHARE!

So a series like BoB was a revelation. And okay, a bloody one at times - but always compelling. Damn good television!

[kitmarlowescot2.livejournal.com]

I did get my grandfather to talk about his exprience, he never did with me, could a younger generation be more likely to get someone from WW2 to talk, because all I have ever done is ask him questions. Including with some of the bad stuff, when he had a few as he calls them "heart thumpers", once where he had to dodge into a fox hole because of attilery, another when a jeep a few links in front of him went over a mind, another when he and his company captured 20 or 25 german soliders, not knowing what else could be their, and the funniest dealing with sleeping in a barn on bags of either turnips or potato's and hearing a shot in the middle of the night because the guard kept yelling at something that was moving to stop and it won't and turned out the solider killed dead the farmer's prize bull where my grandfather's company was staying overnight. He was with field and artillery the big guns, where he was the one to locate targets on maps and by sight I think and direct the big guns, so he was not on the front lines but behind them a little. Acourse those guns left him half deaf and then working at NASA back in the day where their no safety regulations dealing with noise has left him barely any hearing. His brother did step on a mine during the war losing his leg, but my grandfather's brother seemed to do ok with it. Though he died before my own birth, my mother can remember him never having any difficulty moving around with it, even going to the beach and walking around one legged.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the interviews always work in the series. And it works that, until the last episode, they don't identify by name the people in the interviews (though whoever cast "Guarnere" and "Malarky" deserves kudos because those young actors looked like the men they were portraying.)

But, yes, it is an excellent series and that's because it's not just battle after battle. It's following the men who lived through it.

[st_salieri.livejournal.com]

I'm deliberately not reading your entry because I don't want to spoil myself, but I just wanted to say that my sister got me Band of Brothers for my birthday and I'm all excited to dive in and start watching.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

It's definitely worth watching.

I have been able to watch and re-watch "Band of Brothers," whereas I only ever watched "Saving Private Ryan" once (and really can never bring myself to watch it again. It's a good movie, but so very hard to watch.) I remember when watching "Private Ryan," I was so numb from all the horror, that it was difficult to feel anything but nihilism by the end of the movie. "Band of Brothers" is far more humanist, focusing on the men (as I noted --but you were probably unable to read since you wisely skipped being spoiled-- "Band of Brothers" rotates its POV character, so that the lead in one episode may just be a bit part in another episode. In some episodes the POV character is an officer, in another it's a sergeant, in another its a private or the company medic, etc. The process of swapping POV characters allows the audience to know and love many of the men/characters, which gives the story more personal emotion than the overwhelming, yet somehow generalized, horror that you experience in "Saving Private Ryan."

To me, other than Hanks, few characters in SPR are memorable, but in BoB you easily remember the stalwart, quiet but infinitely reassuring officer played by Damien Lewis, the snarky, drinks-too-much (but who could really blame him) officer played by (Office Space's) Ron Livingston, the level-headed Donnie Wahlberg character, the (entirely too pretty) shady, at times unnerving, but frighteningly brave character played by Matthew Settle, and there's a whole list of characters of all ranks who you learn about and come to love (Plus, a couple that you can't stand).

The series specifically follows the men of 'Easy' Company in the 101st Airborn Division. They interview the actual vets in the beginning of nearly every episode, but they don't give you the names of the men being interviewed until the very last episode, so you you can't really guess from the interviews which men live through the entire war(although the casting is so good in two cases that it's rather easy to pick out which two actors are playing these two particular men).

Anyway, what works for me is that BoB goes through more than just the battles. It starts before D-Day, so that it begins in the training camps. It shows the horror of D-Day and then the cognitive dissonance of when, after D-Day, they were taken back to England for a while (and, as a viewing experience, their joy at being back in Britain is a relief to the unbearable tension of what's gone before). Basically, I found the series did a good job of balancing the horror with character moments, such that you never become numb and begin to love these men-- who really are just young men and boys, scared shitless, who want the war to be over so they can go home (and just when it reaches a point of where they wonder what in the hell the point of it all is, they come across a concentration camp, and it's made quite clear. And it's not just manipulative plotting, this is the history of what happened to this particular company in the 101st Airborn). Ultimately, the series follows them to the very end of the war, where there is peace again.

The fighting and death is balanced by emotion and humanity, which makes it a very moving viewing experience( which I found different from the wholly depressing experience of SPR).

In BoB, you feel the horror of all the death but you also feel love for the men who survived, so that the lingering feeling isn't one of depression but of awe and respect for everything these men went through.

Just about the final quote of the series is in an interview with one of the vets, where he says his grandson asked him whether he had been a hero in the war (and, watching the series, YES, he had been), and he said that he told his grandson "No.. but I served in the company of heroes." That really represents the heart and soul of the mini-series.