Behind the Lines

This period drama was based on the Booker Prize-winning novel by author Pat Barker, one of a trilogy dealing with World War I. James Wilby stars as Siegfried Sassoon, the real-life war hero and poet who, in 1917, writes a statement against the war that is read in Parliament. Faced with the choice of ...more

This well-mounted period piece raises several intriguing big-theme questions about the nature of war -- particularly one as brutal as World War I -- as well as explores the early concepts of the science of psychiatry. Jonathan Pryce's Dr. Rivers is a military man of a progressive mind, and his cerebral run-ins with his famous patient Siegfried Sassoon (James Wilby make for compelling conversations that demand the viewer's attention. Sassoon is sent from the bloody trenches of the front to ...more