The Damned, or at least their last tour through Montana
(I danatti)
2024
This is not to be confused with the legendary punk band with such members as David Vanian, Captain Sensible, Rat Scabies and Brian James, or the flick from 1967 made by the great communist aristocrat director Luchino Visconti starring Dirk Bogarde; or the recent flick by an Icelandic director set in Iceland in the 1870s about a bunch of people at a fishing station trying to do some fishing and then bad things happen to them.
This is a completely different movie that came out recently called The Damned. You can see why I chose to watch and review it right now? Maximum confusion, that’s what I’m going for. How do two such completely different flicks come out in the same year, with the same title?
It’s not even that great a title, or even really that applicable here. Are all the people involved damned? Sure, but no more so than any of the rest of us. Is it a war movie, or even more importantly, is it a movie about the US Civil War? Well, kinda.
Mostly this flick is about a camera that hides behind a bunch of guys in Union army clothing wandering around doing stuff, or not doing stuff. There’s no film score to convince you that you’re watching something fictional. But it’s not a documentary. It’s kind of a re-enactment, but we usually call that “fiction”.
It’s just some guys, hanging out. When they speak the dialogue sounds pretty contemporary, as in, there’s no attempt to make it sound like dialogue from the 1800s. And what they talk about is the mundane aspects of what they’re doing, or about their lives, or about what they’re meant to do.
It’s curious, a curious endeavour. I’ve read reviews where it’s compared to the work of Terrence Malick, and to that I would say Malick never works in such a spare manner. The score in his flicks, and the almost constant voiceovers to go with all the sublimely composed images, all do the heavy lifting that he doesn’t trust to dialogue or to acting. That’s simplistic, and probably unfair, but he does have his ways, his methods.
This is more like… I dunno, slice of life? Depicting the mundane everyday reality of what it could have been like for a bunch of these soldiers, wandering around, doing what they’re doing, with no illusions of being warriors fighting for a righteous cause?
They’re just guys, wandering around. Two of them are even kids, being 16 year old twins. There’s a meditative quality to flicks like this; the landscape’s not there to awe us, it’s just the place where these lost souls happen to be wandering.
As such it’s somewhat hypnotic. Are they genuinely damned, are they already dead but they don’t know it? They are certainly lost, somewhere that’s meant to be Montana, patrolling, as they wait for the rest of their company to return from New Mexico. They don’t have names, for the most part. There’s a sergeant, and the rest are scouts or soldiers: I don’t recall hearing names.
For some people, everything I’ve already written so far would be enough to tell them that this flick not only is not their cup of tea, but they should now put their fist through their screen just to make absolutely sure that they don’t accidentally watch this flick or its trailer. Other people might be intrigued, and they’ll be even more disappointed. There’s no secret surprise, no payoff, no twist that recasts everything we’ve seen in a new light.
It’s hard for me to argue that this flick rewards patience. It certainly requires patience, and by patience I mean letting go of every expectation or notion of what flicks are “supposed” to deliver narratively or dramatically. Not every flick has to have a three act structure or conform to 4 quadrant demographic delight.
You have to let go of a lot of yourself in order to enjoy certain flicks, and I can’t always do it. Sometimes I would find flicks like this infuriating. At others, like when I watched this, a bit confused but mostly admiring, I allow the fact that it’s not a regular flick to lull me into a different mind space, one which perhaps matches the unmoored, untethered feel of what the actors are going through.
When harm comes to most of them, it’s not really much of a surprise, but it is shocking. None of their training really prepared them, and the tranquil environment they’ve been wandering around in for so long now seems entirely hostile to them. They shouldn’t be here, but they are because of colonialism, not because of ideological differences over slavery.
When the killers come to kill, we don’t even see them that clearly, and then so many of the lost get even more lost, in that way which can no longer occupy our screen without reverting to an actual ghost story, as opposed to an implied one.
The director is Italian, but lived a long while in the States, so he’s not a complete outsider looking in, but it feels like the kind of film only an outsider could really make about the States or its history. It’s another reminder, those of us outside of that vaunted republic’s hideous gravity, of just how weird those gun and televangelist worshipping numbskulls truly are.
Two of the characters seem to have more of a connection to each other than most of the other cast, and I’m not saying that because they’re around for longer than most of the rest. They guy with the red hair, and the shaved headed guy with the pointy black beard. There was… something there. Brothers in arms? Love is, after all, a battlefield, in the wise words of Pat Benatar.
Oh yeah, this is a film for beards in any and every sense of the word. There is some mighty beard work going on here, and all of them look natural and homegrown, not like something that came out of the make-up artist’s box of tricks. No-sir-ee, only the realest of beards dare apply.
It's pretty obvious most of the people participating aren’t actors, and that’s okay. They’re there to stand around and wear a uniform, which is 90 per cent of what people do in movies or tv whether it’s Star Trek or in Wes Anderson movies, and while you could say “well anyone can do that”, it might be accurate but it doesn’t tell the full story.
Maybe they brought their own uniforms. There are a fair few other US Civil War flicks, and I’m not going to mention Gone with the Wind, because that was about nincompoops on the other side of the conflict, but stuff like Gettysburg, Cold Mountain, Ride with the Devil or Gods and Generals or even Glory glorify the war and its participants. They are not just men; they are greater than that, killing and dying for their ideals, for their country. We all know that that’s bullshit, but we pretend otherwise. The Damned doesn’t pretend. These men were lost the moment they signed up, the moment the war started. I don’t think it’s saying the war was pointless, just that war is kinda pointless, and it’s hard to disagree.
The lack of an imposed or obvious narrative unfortunately means the viewer, who has plenty of time on their hands, has all these opportunities to imagine what the flick might actually be about, because the director and the actors surely aren’t going to tell us otherwise.
I like that level of freedom, occasionally. Sure, we would all just waste it anyway, but I appreciate the chance
7 times it’s nice when movies give you a chance to prepare your tax returns or get the ironing done out of 10
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“That first time when I had a chance to shoot, it was like I was just standing back, watching myself, when the gun went off. Like it just happened.” – raised my rifle to my eye / never stopped to wonder why / then I saw black and my face splashed in the sky - The Damned
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