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The waking nightmare of the Vietnam War, analyzed in the bluntest terms as a senseless violation. Platoon realism is at once punctured, the camera divulges its oneiric artifice with a bisected screen for the tunnels beneath the exploding jungle floor and a blood-speckled lens as a doomed specialist is shot mid-sentence. "Some mad fucking minute, huh, cherry?" American grunts on a reconnaissance mission led by a strutting sergeant (Sean Penn), "a little portable R&R" to him means kidnapping a local Vietnamese maiden (Thuy Thu Le), the patrol is divided between eager participants and helpless witnesses. "Genghis Khan" to hayseed comrades and "the meanest motherfucker in the valley" in his own mind, a beast to the appalled private (Michael J. Fox) watching numbly as the rape hootch seems to sink in a canted POV shot. "It's what armies do." Full Metal Jacket is taken into account but Brian De Palma is closer here to the Kubrick of Paths of Glory, in both cases a wise-guy virtuoso unleashes his earnest outrage in a sorrowing spectacle. "I'm sorry" is the tremulous byword of the impotent military novice in the face of the atrocity, the victim's agonized Via Dolorosa on a railroad bridge weaves a note from Mizoguchi's Ugetsu into a large-scale salute to The Bridge on the River Kwai. "What happens in the field stays in the field," to bear testimony is a most perilous act in a system of venomous macho codes. A lieutenant's lament, a piercing Ving Rhames monologue: "Now, wasn't I on the side of righteousness? So, what was I doing in jail?" Court-martial justice is short-lived but guilt is perpetual, absolution from the ghost in the San Francisco subway can exist only in dreams. "Couldn't let it rest, could you?" De Palma lacerates his own elegiac surfaces for Redacted, an annihilating companion piece. Cinematography by Stephen H. Burum. With Don Harvey, John C. Reilly, John Leguizamo, Erik King, Jack Gwaltney, and Dale Dye.
--- Fernando F. Croce |