1989 war movie
Rating: 16/20
Plot: A real American boy turns into a real American man, heads over to Vietnam, and loses the use of his legs. How's he going to impress his mother with his wrestling abilities now?
I put some thought into this, and I think Oliver Stone has to be partially responsible for turning me into a person who thinks more seriously about movies. This movie has just the right kind of cheapo symbolism and film school acrobatics that appealed to me when I first saw it as a guy who was starting to figure things out.
Things are cheesy in the early going, maybe intentionally so as Stone paints this idyllic America. Or maybe I should say it's idyllic while still seeming somehow off. A nostalgic and idealistic voice over narrates a time when you could take your dogs into battle, back in the good old days when war was nothing more than sweaty fun, but a subsequent parade with firecracker smoke obscuring the pageantry and flags and rock bands and clowns is foreboding. I mean, you've got these shots of a clown on an absurdly tall unicycle followed by limbless veterans rolling themselves down the parade route in their wheelchairs as they wince at the firecracker cracking. A translucent flag replaces a tossed twirling baton, one that I heard somebody say was a visual allusion to the monkey-tossed bone in 2001, and there's talk of a little Yankee doodle dandy boy, and everything is peachy because that's the kind of words they used back then.
Tom Cruise's parents play their roles. They're the exact kinds of parents you'd expect the greatest generation to be. Dad screams "That's my boy!" after a slow-motion Little League movie homer. Mom spouts heavy-handed nonsense about dreaming of her son making speeches, a monologue that should have ended with her looking directly at the camera and saying, "That's fucking foreshadowing, you commies" before cackling. The word "best" is thrown out often, as well as the idea of what makes a man a man, other than that pair of testicles that Lebowski mentions. But of course, we'll later see that this movie is really all about testicles. Cruise's wrestling coach talks about being the best, something that involves suffering, victory, and even killing. An Army guy also talks about manhood and looking for the best. Then there's mom, saying that being the best is all that matters to God. God, as most Christians will tell you, values pride. He did, after all, create the testicles, I think on the 8th day. And obviously, God's going to play a big part in this time back when America was great. Sure the prayer offered by our character might seem a little confused as a real man probably wouldn't tell God that he'd rather say in Massapequa instead of killing communists or whatever, but you know the guy on the crucifix next to Mickey Mantle (or is it Mickey Mantle on that crucifix?) understands.
But is the Big Guy cool with the Playboy magazines spotted twice in this early chunk of movie? Of course he is! He created testicles!
War is expected, the front line is "neat," and a love of country and a hatred of abstract communism is the norm. This is a time when real men stood for the national anthem, and they didn't think twice about it.
The big surprise once the action moves to Vietnam is that Vietnam is orange. It's orange and filled with "beaucoup goops," words so fun that you just have to thrown them into the screenplay multiple times. Beaucoup Goops wouldn't be a bad name for a punk band, but I'm not sure it's politically correct. Vietnam is as terrifying as it's supposed to be.
[Note: I just remembered that there is already a band called The Goops, so Beaucoup Goops probably wouldn't work. Scratch it from the record.]
If you'll allow me to digress, I'd like to bring up my dad. My dad was in Vietnam before I was born, but when I ask about it, he never has anything to say except that the bugs were gigantic and there were all these hamburger stands around but no cattle anywhere to be seen. I'm not sure if the insects and hamburgers are related or not, but sometimes I like to think they are. I don't know if my dad saw horrifying things or if he encountered beaucoup goops. He doesn't talk about it, and I don't know if he went to Vietnam as a man, became a man while he was in Vietnam, or became a man when he returned and did his part with his testicles to produce me.
These men experience horrifying things. The terrifying "Do you see the rifles?" sequence. Intestine glimpses. Characters asking "Where's the devil at?" or announcing "It's so hot out here, I want to kill somebody." Men or animals? They're terrifying and terrified creatures regardless of what they are, and that's before the blood spurts and the gurgles and the great upside-down perspective shot we see when Forrest Gump picks up Tom Cruise and saves his life.
Stone doesn't spend all that much time in Vietnam, a lot less than I remembered anyway. There are more scenes in an equally horrifying place--the Bronx veterans hospital. Actually, I'm not sure if it's horrifying or if it's just so completely hopeless that it seems horrifying, and I'm also not sure whether horrifying or hopeless is worse. The hopelessness butts up against Cruise's optimism, and it's almost like another little war has popped up. Cruise dreams, struggling in this land of zombies, and he fights to keep his leg and be treated like a human in a place and a situation where being treated like a human is seemingly impossible. Catheters and primal screams and doctors delivering the worst kinds of news for a guy who desperately wants to be a man, a shot of a flag behind blinds.
I haven't said anything about Cruise's performance. He doesn't hang from helicopters here, but there's still this physicality with the performance, evident in these hospital scenes even when he's lying motionless. And that scene where he "walks" as fellow patients and the movie audience cheers him on might be the saddest bit of dramatic irony I've ever seen.
The next chapter of the story has Cruise arriving home again, and he's still a man because he can do twenty-three pull-ups. I can use all of my limbs most of the time, and I'm not even sure I can do a single pull-up. I know I've never shot a goop.
When he gets home, there's a great sequence--perhaps the longest scene in the entire movie--where about a hundred or so of Cruise's friends, family, and neighbors tell him how he looks great. "You look great," they all say--those exact words over and over because they can't think of anything real to say. Their words are as artificial as that America we saw in the opening parade. Times have certainly changed. I mean, there are doughnut-hole burgers and short skirts worn for tips. Parade #2 is a foil for Parade #1, similar images taking on different sinister meanings. The background shows a head shop facade, and hippies are flippin' birds, and now it's Cruise who is wincing at gunshots as sad clowns and sadder Indians look on.
There are speeches to be made, ones where it's announced that death is the highest price that can be paid for freedom or some cliche similar to that. And there's Cruise listening to that and wondering about the price he's paid. He's alive, but he's in a kind of purgatory, and that seems like a pretty high price, too, doesn't it?
A baby becomes a motif, a part of a propaganda machine. Nobody eats a baby in this movie, or at least none that I remember.
As if Oliver Stone figured this was around the time that his audience would forget that this is a movie about testicles, he has a pal visit Cruise to talk about how he's not whole because he's missing his dick and balls. Maybe you can lose a dick or a ball or both balls, but I don't think you can lose it all and still be considered a man. The idea of being the best comes to the forefront again, but it's its flipside--the idea of failure or of not winning. Cruise's girlfriend also pops in, and she's moved on while he's still thinking of "Moon River" and enthusiastically telling himself that he will get a hard-on again, right around the time when he will be able to jump on somebody's couch.
And if you think it's just me being filthy and bringing up all this penis talk, just remember the drunken screaming fight with his mom, possibly Cruise's best moment in this movie. After Mom demands, "Don't say 'penis' in this house," Cruise screams, "Penis! Big fucking erect penis, Mom!" And then sobs, "I want to be a man again." It's devastating. When America was great, it could simultaneously make a man out of you and take away your balls. No amount of wheelchair wheelies and songs and picked fights with World War II veterans can bring those back, Tom Cruise.
And then we're in Mexico as Cruise replaces one brand of purgatory with another. And he gets to meet Willem Dafoe who shows off his tongue work, swallows the worm, calls people "Taco Head," and screams with loads of spittle that "the bitch thinks it's funny [he] can't move [his] dick!" That's right, even in Mexico, you can't escape the void created by losing your penis. The prostitutes and the weeping remind us of the importance of the penis, and it feels like we're right in the middle of a Leonard Cohen song.
If the scene where Tom Cruise yells at his mother about erect penises isn't the best scene in this thing, then it's got to be the scene where Cruise and Dafoe fight in the middle of nowhere, a fight that starts with an argument over who killed more babies. You can feel the despair of these two men, longing for things that made sense. Man, Willem Dafoe is great.
Back in America, there's a chance at redemption. I'm not sure I like the last twenty or so minutes of this as much as the rest of it. The character is still wrestling, this time with the truth. I'm not quite sure why he tells his family all about the babies unless that's part of his journey in reclaiming manhood. There's another parade of sorts, that translucent flag image repeated again but this time backwards. It's more of that easy symbolism, but I'm telling you, it goes down awfully smooth. There's another parallel, too, as Cruise finds himself in another war and carried over another Gump's shoulder. No goops though.
And finally, we make a ridiculous jump to 1976 and unfortunately have to hear about Mom's dream again in a flashback. Oh, my. That's uglier than the intestine glimpse from earlier, Oliver Stone. Cruise's last words (or close to his last words) are "I feel like I'm home," and I think that's a missed opportunity. It really should have been something about his penis.
This movie's so on the nose that it nearly crosses the line into embarrassing territories, but that was what made it so easy for me to analyze as a youngster and that's probably what I appreciate the most about it. It's an Oliver Stone movie through and through, and that means you get the director at his most brilliant and his most obnoxiously flawed.
Bob Dylan song: a perhaps too-obvious "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." And if you don't think you're getting some Creedence in this movie, you're probably the type of person who doesn't even know that Vietnam is orange.
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