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The filmmaker as soldier of sorrows, the audience's tour of duty. Out of the belly of the plane on the tarmac to be met by body bags, recruits touching down in Vietnam ca. '67, "Adagio for Strings" mourns them all. "The unwanted" is how the callow college dropout (Charlie Sheen) describes his fellow infantrymen, the more seasoned grunts have little use for crusading poetics: "You gotta be rich in the first place to think like that." The bush is awash in mud and bugs and steam, an accelerating heartbeat overtakes the night sounds as the Viet Cong approach in half-silhouette. Dope and booze can numb only so much tension, the vengeful raid on a peasant village is sketched as an escalating blur of bloodlust and shame. "We drop bombs, then we walk through the jungle like ghosts in a landscape." The war within the war, cf. Aldrich's Attack, Oliver Stone's eyewitness account is suspended jaggedly between visceral tumult and plaintive elegy. Contrasting guardians attend the fire baptism, the humane sergeant (Willem Dafoe) is enlightened through disillusionment and hip enough to connect with the juvenile via a puff of pot through a rifle barrel. (He's dismissed by brass as "a water-walker," expires in a Guernica image.) His opposite number (Tom Berenger) is a slab of scarred granite, the psychotic culmination of the warrior mythos, the engine in the infernal machine. "I am reality." Leech on fleshy cheek and lizard across stone idol, the helter-skelter nocturnal skirmish illuminated by napalm, raw nerves for a rebuke to Eighties jingoism. The closing view is of the corpse-strewn crater from an ascending helicopter, the preppy-surrogate is already working on his anguished prose. Kubrick (Full Metal Jacket) and De Palma (Casualties of War) have their own hells to scour. Cinematography by Robert Richardson. With Keith David, Forest Whitaker, Kevin Dillon, John C. McGinley, Francesco Quinn, Reggie Johnson, Mark Moses, Corey Glover, Johnny Depp, Chris Pedersen, Richard Edson, and Tony Todd.
--- Fernando F. Croce |