A Film Canon

A far more transgressive film than might at first appear, this commemorative biopic makes the ingenious gesture of devoting most of its attention to the five Sullivan brothers' childhood and young adulthood, relegating the war that took their lives to a brief, incongruous, final act, and reducing its actual depiction to no more than five minutes of dark, grainy, impressionistic footage - the equivalent of an uncensored letter home, or newsreel following the main feature. Not only does this conjure up a world in which the war was still seen as a mere extension of boyhood adventure and, more specifically, of wholesome Irish aggression, but it evokes the moment at which that perception ceased, such that the final note is of a sudden, radical rupture in the fabric of small-town American life; or, alternatively, a reification of the loss of a generation, in the abrupt transition from the constant yelling, fighting and talking that accompanies the boys' pre-war pursuits, to the silence that settles as soon as they leave, and solidifies from the moment that news of their death is broken ("This house hasn't seen quiet in twenty-five years."). From this perspective, the final launching of the USS Sullivans feels like little more than jingoistic over-compensation, the real conclusion coming with Pa Sullivan's (Thomas Mitchell) hopeless salute of the silence and emptiness residing in one of his sons' favourite haunts - and even the patriotic subtext of this gesture is offset by the implicit connection between his invocation of the right to lash those sons without provocation, and the government's right to conscript them into battle; a crisis of fatherhood, and even faith, that tends to negate rhetorical posturing, while translating sympathy into a distinctly maternal register.