"My Boy Jack" is the second film that successfully portrays Kipling as a character - Huston's "The Man Who Would Be King" being the first. Whereas Huston's film was a great allegory of the British Raj or empire-making in general, "My Boy Jack" relates the writer's personal tragedy at the death of his only son who died at Loos in 1915, and in what was called "the Great War" back in the days when no one knew that a greater still was shortly to come. The tragedy was compounded by the fact that Kipling had used his influence to get Jack into the Irish Guards in spite of a medical examination which Jack failed due to poor eyesight inherited from his father.
The film is more than brilliantly acted by scriptwriter David Haig (Kipling), Kim Cattrall (Carrie Kipling), Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter graduated from Hogsworth to play Jack) and Carey Mulligan (Elsie Kipling), but it sets out to paint a slightly hindsighty and overly pacifist picture of what actually occurred. David Haig's screenplay shows us a family at war with each other, with the boy almost pressurized by his father to join the army (after he fails the Navy examination), and it shows Carrie and Elsie openly blaming Kipling for Jack's death in scenes that are more reminiscent of a modern day soap opera than a portrait of the clear-sighted Kipling and his staunch and ever-supportive American wife.
There is a faint odor of post-Vietnam pacifism over the entire film, although never too explicit and always clashing with the stark realities of WWI that are also duly included: that Britain simply could not allow Germany and Austria to run rampant across Europe. Action was indeed called for, and there was no doubt about it, for, as Orwell once put it: pacifists are the objective allies of tyrants.
Kipling has been called a jingoist and warmonger (a title later ascribed to Churchill whose similar stand would save Europe from the Germans some twenty years later) and Kipling has been called an imperialist but mainly by people who fail to understand his writings or, indeed, haven't read them. Kipling did not change his view of war or of the empire after the death of his son, he was always a realist although a subtle one and remained so.
The film ends with a very fine and subtle dialog between Kipling and George V. The king relates the death of his own young son. The film lets George V find the body of the prince, still warm, which he counts a blessing this forms a heartrending contrast to Kipling who never recovered the body of his son at all, but there is yet another contrast in the deaths of the two sons when Kipling quotes his poem "My Boy Jack" that closes the film, indicating his small comfort found in the fact that John Kipling gave his life to a worthy cause in an ultimately inevitable war: "Then hold your head up all the more, this tide and every tide; because he was the son you bore and gave to that wind blowing and that tide."
The film is more than brilliantly acted by scriptwriter David Haig (Kipling), Kim Cattrall (Carrie Kipling), Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter graduated from Hogsworth to play Jack) and Carey Mulligan (Elsie Kipling), but it sets out to paint a slightly hindsighty and overly pacifist picture of what actually occurred. David Haig's screenplay shows us a family at war with each other, with the boy almost pressurized by his father to join the army (after he fails the Navy examination), and it shows Carrie and Elsie openly blaming Kipling for Jack's death in scenes that are more reminiscent of a modern day soap opera than a portrait of the clear-sighted Kipling and his staunch and ever-supportive American wife.
There is a faint odor of post-Vietnam pacifism over the entire film, although never too explicit and always clashing with the stark realities of WWI that are also duly included: that Britain simply could not allow Germany and Austria to run rampant across Europe. Action was indeed called for, and there was no doubt about it, for, as Orwell once put it: pacifists are the objective allies of tyrants.
Kipling has been called a jingoist and warmonger (a title later ascribed to Churchill whose similar stand would save Europe from the Germans some twenty years later) and Kipling has been called an imperialist but mainly by people who fail to understand his writings or, indeed, haven't read them. Kipling did not change his view of war or of the empire after the death of his son, he was always a realist although a subtle one and remained so.
The film ends with a very fine and subtle dialog between Kipling and George V. The king relates the death of his own young son. The film lets George V find the body of the prince, still warm, which he counts a blessing this forms a heartrending contrast to Kipling who never recovered the body of his son at all, but there is yet another contrast in the deaths of the two sons when Kipling quotes his poem "My Boy Jack" that closes the film, indicating his small comfort found in the fact that John Kipling gave his life to a worthy cause in an ultimately inevitable war: "Then hold your head up all the more, this tide and every tide; because he was the son you bore and gave to that wind blowing and that tide."