TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/082189/08218900.059

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 4KB | 68 lines

CINEMA, Page 54

Vice and Victims in Viet Nam

By Richard Schickel


    CASUALTIES OF WAR
    Directed by Brian De Palma;
    Screenplay by David Rabe

    Why are we in Viet Nam? Again. At this late date. In the case
of Casualties of War, there can be only one answer: for further
diagnostic tests on the national conscience. For the story it
tells, based on an incident first reported in The New Yorker by
Daniel Lang two decades ago, is too brutally horrific to
contemplate unless some moral edification can be derived from it,
some guide to the larger enigmas of human conduct.

    The story, recounted in a grinding, realistic style that is
unlike Brian De Palma's usual manner of playing fast and loose with
death, is simple to describe. A small unit under the command of a
Sergeant Meserve (Sean Penn, in an uncompromising performance) sets
off on a long-range reconnaissance mission. On Meserve's orders,
it stops at a peasant village, where it abducts a young girl and
sadistically binds and gags her for the many awful hours of their
trek. The girl, who is heartbreakingly played by a delicate
newcomer named Thuy Thu Le, will serve as "portable R. and R." In
other words, Meserve intends that he and his men will gang-rape
her. This they eventually do, with only one among them, Eriksson
(Michael J. Fox), refusing to participate and trying to rescue the
girl. She is murdered in a fire fight, and ultimately Eriksson,
despite threats to his own life and the indifference of his
commanding officers, succeeds in bringing charges against his
sometime buddies. They receive, at last, stern punishment from a
court-martial.

    Its surface realism notwithstanding, this movie must be read
symbolically, especially since it is presented as a dream that
overtakes Eriksson years later, when he encounters a young Oriental
woman on a train who reminds him of the long-ago victim. In the
dream, Meserve -- arrogant, competent, headlong (in short, a born
American leader) -- is an archetype of the worst in the national
character. Eriksson -- frail-looking but articulate and morally
alert -- is the beleaguered best. The remainder of the unit is, of
course, the hulking, muddled majority, all too willing to be conned
by anyone who seems to be sure of his goals, however perverse.
Their victim represents all of the innocents who, by accident, find
themselves in the path of Yankee imperialism.

    The script, by playwright David Rabe (Streamers, Hurlyburly),
introduces some complexities into this schematic story. Eriksson
owes his life to Meserve's military skills. The sergeant, who is
not presented as a psychopath, and the other men are in a furor
because a buddy has been killed in an ambush at a supposedly
pacified village. Eriksson has an interesting speech in which he
argues that the standard rationale for bad wartime behavior ("We
might at any second be blown away") is exactly wrong. It is
precisely because soldiers live inches from death that they should
be "extra careful about what we do." The ending, in which Eriksson
is awakened from his nightmare and, in effect, offered absolution
by his trainmate, seems to propose that decent Americans may, at
last, enjoy sleep untroubled by the naggings of historical
conscience. It is, at least in popular-cultural terms, novel.

    But still the movie does not work. Its true story is too
singular to serve as the basis for moral generalizations. The ideas
advanced by the film are, in any case, not significantly different
from the ones put forward by opponents of the war while it was
going on. But it is its distant and curiously monotonous tone that
finally betrays Casualties of War. It numbs the conscience instead
of awakening it.