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Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9780784013434
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Original recording reissued, NTSC
ISBN: 0784013438
Label: Live / Artisan
Manufacturer: Live / Artisan
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Live / Artisan
Release Date: April 24, 2001
Running Time: 96 minutes
Sales Rank: 2226
Studio: Live / Artisan
Theatrical Release Date: August 14, 1998
Editorial Review:
Amazon.com:
This extraordinary World War I film concerns themes of heroism, sacrifice, duty, and self-knowledge as profound as any in Saving Private Ryan. The story, taken from Pat Barker's 1991 novel Regeneration and based on true events, is set in a British Army hospital in Craiglockart, Scotland, in 1917. There, a pioneering psychiatrist named Dr. William Rivers (Jonathan Pryce) works with shell-shocked soldiers in a gentle, humane manner that contrasts sharply with the brutality of his colleagues. (The film's most horrifying scene features a mute patient being forced to speak by means of electric shock.)
Among Rivers's patients is a mute, amnesiac officer named Billy Prior (Jonny Lee Miller), as well as the emotionally depleted poet Wilfred Owen (Stuart Bunce) and another poet and war hero, Siegfried Sassoon (James Wilby). Unlike the others, Sassoon is not, in fact, suffering from any disorder but is being quietly punished for writing a pamphlet denouncing the war. The army hopes Rivers can find some basis for mental incompetency in Sassoon, but the thoughtful doctor instead attempts to persuade him to add legitimacy to his criticisms of the war by returning to active duty.
Pryce brilliantly captures the cumulative effects of Rivers's responsibility--of fixing men and sending them back to their possible deaths--on the good doctor's nerves. Wilby is also fine as Sassoon, but the film belongs just as much to actors Miller and Bunce, whose characters are different kinds of men struggling to find their balance, one through a revived sense of duty and the other through his writing. Scottish filmmaker Gillies Mackinnon (The Playboys) is at the top of his form, telling a unique story about the invisible wounds of war while shedding light on the meeting of two visionary poets and one visionary physician. --Tom Keogh
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Mutilated film
In 1998 I saw a great war film that was lost in the glare of the nearly simultaneous American film releases of Terrence Malick's remake of The Thin Red Line- which is a great film, and Steven Spielberg's cliché and stereotype-dripping Saving Private Ryan. It was a 1997 Canadian and British film called Regeneration, directed by Gillies MacKinnon (who directed The Playboys, and Small Faces), based upon the famed book of the same title by British novelist Pat Barker. The screenplay was written by Allan ... Read More
Rating: - War is ... Complicated
When Siegfried Sassoon threw away his medals and wrote against Great Britain's further participation in WWI, the British government responded by throwing him in a mental asylum for shell shocked soldiers. After all, a "gentleman" would have to be mad to oppose the "good" war.
It didn't change Sassoon's mind; however, during his stay in the asylum, he met and encouraged another WWI poet, Wildred Owen, to write some of the most damning and movie poetry of the war. Both Sassoon and Owen went ... Read More
Rating:  - Behind The Lines
A rivetting drama based on real life events in WW1 and the psychological disasters occurring from service in the action on the western Front - well before the term 'Post-traumatic Stress Disorder" came into vogue. Full of drama, dilemmas and human emotion. Tightly edited and beautifully photographed. Well worth viewing, indeed repeat viewing.
Rating: - A good film that should have been a great one
Despite promising material - the relationship between World War One poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and the pioneering work of psychiatrist Dr W.H.R. Rivers in dealing with shell-shocked soldiers at Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland - and Pat Barker's fine source novel, Regeneration (given a brief theatrical release in the US as Behind the Lines) is something of a disappointment. It's not so much that it's bad, though it does have many problems, more that it's not great when it could and should ... Read More
Rating: - Good adaptation of Barker's Regeneration
I think Pat Barker's World War I trilogy is one of the finest literary works of this century. Thus it was a treat to see a film adaptation of the first of the three novels, Regeneration, in this DVD, "Behind the Lines". There were many solid strenghts to this film.
First, the cinematography and art direction was exceptional. The confined atmosphere of a Scottish mental hospital contrasted against the muddy horror of the front lines and trenches of World War I was exceptional. Scottland in quiet ... Read More
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