There is certainly a very real wave of ‘40s nostalgia percolating in the rotten underbelly of 2020 so far. One instance of this is the President of the United States’ tone-deaf diatribes concocting Antifa conspiracies mere days before the anniversary of D-Day, a literal Antifa conspiracy that is also heralded as one of the grandest achievements of the Greatest Generation. Another source of recalling the ‘40s with longing comes from that same president’s lack of leadership and unwillingness to enact the immense powers of executive authority in an emergency to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak, powers dating back to the ‘40s when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. As US-Americans bunker in our homes against the virus or take to the streets against systemic racism, the ‘40s keep erupting into our everyday.
This is the ideal context for a documentary such as like Return to Hardwick to find itself on film-viewing screens. The film follows the present-day offspring of a US World War II bomber squadron—along with a few of the now-very-old veterans of the squadron—as they make a pilgrimage to Hardwick, England, where the bomber squadron was based for most of the war. It is a nostalgia film about the decade that frames our current weird moment, which seems just perfect. Unfortunately, the film fails to find a narrative thread to hold it together and the result is an occasionally captivating, always disjointed and invariably unfocused jumble.
Return to Hardwick never decides what it wants to be about. Sometimes, the film details the past exploits of the bomber squadron during the war, using a combination of archival footage, interviews with veterans and chroniclers of the unit and museum artifacts. These historical segments are worthwhile, even if they tell a familiar story—of US and UK cooperation to defeat the Nazi menace—with a familiar shortcoming, namely conveniently forgetting the primary role played by the Soviet Red Army in the demise of Hitler’s war machine. But these segments are scattered, short and are not enough to constitute a feature-length film.
The other sort of footage in Return to Hardwick details the reunion trek of the unit and its survivors—often multiple generations removed from the war-fighting members of the unit—to Hardwick. A few leading protagonists are the nephew of a unit member who died at the English base after a fiery accidental crash; this nephew brought along his granddaughters. Another major participant is the now-grown son of a unit member who returned from the war but died when the son was only 15; the son has made the trek in search of community and connection. The third and final present-day focus of the film is a woman whose mother and father met and were married at Hardwick.
While some of the discrete moments with this present-day cast are touching—such as the daughter visiting the chapel where her parents were married—none of these characters are really all that interesting as depicted in the film. Nor is the film dynamic in showing the reunion; for instance, one “breakthrough” moment captured for the film is the woman’s discovery of a picture of her parents that she had never seen before. While seemingly personally important to that woman, it means nothing to the viewer and feels fairly small potatoes in significance. Mostly, the camera follows the reunion members through overgrown forested spots where barracks used to be or shows them being lectured by the bomber unit’s unofficial chronicler as he points in the distance at what used to be a runway.
Return to Hardwick is very poorly edited, but this is partially due to the lack of energy, narrative drama or focus in the story it seeks to tell. The impression it leaves is that remembering this one particular bomber unit is of monumental importance to a handful of passionate survivors of the unit’s veterans. These disparate adults feel a connection with one another because of their common link to the bomber group and they enjoy making regular pilgrimages to the unit’s old English base. That the documentary about these survivors and their practice of remembering is not very good is not an indictment of the survivors or their ideas; it just means that the story does not have broad reach beyond their narrow circle of dedicated commemoration.
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