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Robert Altman back in the "goddamn Army" for a thoroughgoing scraping of the wise-guy MASH veneer. Parachutes that fail to open comprise the war metaphor, the freefall begins with waiting soldiers in claustrophobic barracks. Kubrick surely remembered Matthew Modine here as "a storyteller" and "a busybody" when casting Full Metal Jacket, David Alan Grier as the black recruit who's learned not to rock the boat plays the role for all the noisy and quiet comedy in it. Both soldiers are repulsed and fascinated by the would-be sophisticate from Manhattan (Mitchell Lichtenstein) whose very presence threatens the military cult of masculinity, a fear of snakes figures knowingly in "that fag stuff." The wild card is the outsider (Michael Wright) who, armed with jiving wrath and switchblade, infiltrates the circle of anxiety and pushes it to the breaking point. "That's the nice thing about the long fuse..." Rows of cots and a shower room, a window into the basketball court outside and the screens within screens of open lockers, the blueprint for translating David Rabe's theatrics into hard-edge cinematic space. (The slow zoom isolates the suggestive gesture, the nudie magazine by the muddy boot or the hand caressing the dangling ankle.) The battlefield inside, a doomed venture under the eyes of a pair of loudmouth sergeants (Guy Boyd, George Dzundza) with a sloshed ditty ("Beautiful streamer, this looks like the end / The earth is below me, my body won't bend"). Screaming and swishing and blubbering in the vortex, drab greens gradually splashed with visceral reds. "Damn, man. You attackin' or retreatin'?" From Vietnam to Reagan, as Robin Wood would have it, Altman's camera departs as the storm rumbles. Cinematography by Pierre Mignot.
--- Fernando F. Croce |