If ever the word "sprawling" applied to a television miniseries, this is the one. It's like watching the unfolding of World War II through the hundred eyes of a housefly, each lens yielding a different perspective.
There are not only multiple generations involve -- those are intrinsic to epic series and epic novels -- but an entire extended family of consanguineals and affines, all facing different inner conflicts and circumstantial troubles.
Robert Mitchum is listed at the head of the cast but only because of his name recognition. We don't see him any more often than we see his family. There are few battle scenes, relatively well done. Most of the emphasis is on Jane Seymour and John Gielgud as two Jews of substance who are gradually swept up in the Nazi's genocidal programs. Seymour barely survives; Gielgud doesn't.
Herman Wouk clearly put an enormous amount of effort into his novel and contributed to the screenplay. Some of the dialog is lifted straight from the book. Yet, structurally, Wouk has weakened the story in order to cover every major historical even he could get his hands on. The plight of Seymour and Gielgud is particularly depressing because it's so literal. We are taken into the Disinfection Room with Gielgud and stay with him as he and dozens of other naked inmates at Auschwitz, including women and their children, die horrifying deaths. We see his corpse shoveled unceremoniously into the furnaces. We follow his ashes as they are dumped with a thousand others into a nearby river. We see familiar footage of cadavers being bulldozed into mass graves.
It's a terrible downer. Still, the path taken by the pair, from distinguished American citizens to despair, is necessary to the narrative. For one thing, it provides us with some insight into the insidious nature of the extermination program, which liquidated not only six million Jews but probably as many other undesirables -- homosexuals, gypsies, political dissidents, inferior Slavs. The process wasn't implemented all at once.
For another, and I realize this sounds a little incredible, a lot of younger people of college age and even older, have no clear idea of what went on. At best, the genocide was an historical event, as remote as the Big Bang. At worst, we now have "holocaust deniers" who don't believe it happened. So, yes, emotionally draining or not, leave the sequences in.
Herman Wouk's best novel was "The Caine Mutiny" because it was a taut tale of life aboard a US Navy ship run by a paranoid eccentric, told mostly through the description of one upper-class, naive young man, Willie Kieth, who grows to maturity under stress. His relationship with a nightclub singer is an ancillary but accurate parallel to Keith's evolving sensibilities.
"War and Remembrance", for all its ambition and for all the research that went into it, is less focused and finally less interesting. It takes us all over the place -- Pearl Harbor, London, Paris, Moscow, Poland. It's an ensemble piece in which it's easy to lose track of the dozen or more main characters, all of whom seem to be falling in love in ways, and with people, that may or may not be foolish. There are top-level political scenes but they're overwhelmed by questions about whether Mitchum and his wife should be divorced and whether he should then marry the British journalist and whether she will have him if he proposes. In other words, it begins at times to look an awful lot like a soap opera.
Another elements of the series, which some may not find as irritating as I did, is the essentially bourgeois nature of Mitchum's family and his intentions. Mitchum's character is morally pure. He always makes the right judgment, or tries to. Any resentment in relationships are always slightly masked or underplayed. Mitchum is taciturn and he "listens" well. He always did. But that's about all he does. He never lets loose with a feral howl as he did when belting Madam Anthorp in "Farewell, My Lovely."
And, just as in "The Caine Mutiny," Wouk is simply unable to get inside the head of ordinary enlisted men. Wouk's Navy characters are almost always high-ranking officers sitting around at formal dinners in snazzy dress white uniforms. They never heard of khaki. We get to know absolutely nothing about the enlisted men. The few lines of dialog they get are given in corn cob dialects. I'm prejudiced because I was a swab, true, but if you want an enlisted man's view of the military at that time, read James Jones' "From Here To Eternity," where you'll discover that those in the military don't always sit around in immaculate dress uniforms, drinking tea, and being polite, but that some have to scrub pots and pans.
The bonus "featurette" isn't worth watching. As all those who are interviewed tell us, it was great. It was great working with the others. It was great that we overcome difficulties with weather and politics during the shoot. The director was great. The cameraman was the finest in the world. In a word, it was all great.
