Pic of the Week: War is Hell edition

(thus ends the first – and hopefully last – time I’ll ever quote General Sherman in this blog)

I don’t really get into war movies, for the same reason I don’t really get into Westerns – namely, it’s almost always a bunch of white guys being macho and killing each other in horrible ways, with a tedious good guy-bad guy dichotomy that doesn’t teach me anything I didn’t already know. But in my recent viewing, I noticed a trend, so hear goes:

“Grace is Gone” (2007)
This one got lumped into that year’s tiny spate of Iraq War-themed movies along with “Lions for Lambs” and “Rendition” – unfairly, if you ask me. Because “Grace is Gone” is only just barely about Iraq. It could be about any war, really, or any non-war loss of a loved one. John Cusack plays a milquetoast middle-management Army vet whose wife, an Army sergeant, is killed serving in Iraq. He finds that he can’t break the news to their two pre-teen daughters, and so he takes them on an impromptu road trip to Florida to stall for time. It got mixed reviews at the time, with the dislikers complaining that there’s no big message. But that’s what I kind of liked about it. It’s a very quiet film, with understated, realistic acting from Cusack and the actors who play his daughters. I really felt like I was eavesdropping on a real-life military family that was trying to balance its immense pride in the wife/mother’s service with their tangible stress over the same thing. I didn’t see it as a statement about the entirety of the war; it’s just a portrait of one family within that war’s context. Contrast this with Cusack’s “common man” composite (aka “total plot device”) character in…

“Fat Man and Little Boy” (1989)
I added this to my Netflix queue because I’m rereading a biography of Robert Oppenheimer, the head scientist of the Manhattan Project. I bumped it to the top of the queue after the death last week of Natasha Richardson, who plays Oppie’s mistress Jean Tatlock in the film. It’s very definitely the Hollywood version of the development of the atomic bomb. And no, I do not mean that as a compliment – or an insult, either; it just is what it is. Paul Newman plays General Leslie Groves, the military head of the project, who recruits and then repeatedly clashes with Oppenheimer and the other idealistic geniuses at Los Alamos. The problem is that director Roland Joffe wants to have a study of the fascinating real-life characters, their relationships and motivations, AND a standard Hollywood drama. The result is unfocused, trying to tell too many stories and therefore telling none of them well. We get fictionalized events designed to bring Newman’s character to the center of the action (because, hell, he’s Paul Newman), totally fictional characters and a BS love story that I presume was put there to make me, a humble earthling, contemplate the moral implications of nuclear weapons. But just in case I’m too thick, we also get what feels like hours and hours of Deep Conversations. It’s as if the writers had a meeting where someone said, “You know what this flick needs? A scene where the characters talk about the ethics of power, and playing God, and all that”…….. and then had that meeting another 47 times. It ends with a shot of planet Earth, for crying out loud. Planet. Frakking. Earth. And the music sounds like something out of a GI Joe cartoon.
Yes, I’m being hard on this one…It’s not a bad movie. Just one that annoyed the hell out me because, knowing the actual story, I wonder how much stronger a film it could’ve been if they’d just stuck to the facts.


“The Fog of War” (2004)
This documentary – really an extended interview with Kennedy and LBJ defense secretary Robert McNamara – telescopes McNamara’s long career into 11 “lessons” that reflect incidents in that career. McNamara, kind of a stat junkie, worked with the military during World War II to make bombing sorties more efficient, then brought those same stat skills to Ford Motor Company (introducing the radical concept of market research) before Kennedy tapped him to be Secretary of Defense. In that role, he oversaw the introduction of “military advisors” to Vietnam, and later (under Johnson) the troop deployments of the Vietnam War. Being the daughter of a four-time wounded Vietnam veteran, I was prepared to hate McNamara. But damned if the son of a bitch didn’t make it all make sense. He’s helped by archival audio recordings of Johnson urging him to bomb the shit out of Vietnam and lie to the American people about doing it – okay, so it wasn’t ALL his fault. He’s obviously an intelligent, introspective man…It’s remarkable that he can admit that one of the “lessons” that defused the Cuban Missile Crisis – empathize with your opponent – was pretty much ignored in Vietnam (the U.S. saw it as a chance to defeat communism, while the Viet Cong thought the U.S. just wanted to colonize them. Miscommunication, oops!). Though McNamara is self-reflective, even self-critical, it bugged me that he’s the film’s primary source. Take this not as a complete history of our defense policy during the 1960s, but only of one man’s view of it.


“Hart’s War” (2002)
I rewatched this one not long ago, a film I originally rented thanks to my unhealthy crush on Colin Farrell (don’t you judge me!). Okay, so while I’m not going to give this any Oscars (I totally have that power, by the way), it’s hardly the crapfest you might have been led to believe. I think the problem is that this was marketed as “The Great Escape”-lite, when it’s actually “To Kill a Mockingbird” in a POW camp. For starters – Bruce Willis? Not the good guy. He and Colin? Not on the same side. So stop reading the back of the DVD box and just give “Hart’s War” a chance. Preferably over pizza. It gets bonus points for giving that guy from “Entourage” a horrible death, and loses said bonus points for indulging in the same kind of “this character is only here to prove a point and make you THINK” crap that annoyed me in “Fat Man and Little Boy.”

“Tigerland” (2000)
This drama stars Colin Farrell --- okay, I can hear you, and you know what? Kiss it, ‘cause this is actually a good movie. It’s a Vietnam movie that never gets within a continent of Vietnam, and yet somehow captures the ambivalence of the soldiers who were forced to fight that ambiguous war. Farrell is a much-court martialed private uncomfortably discovering his latent leadership skills in a training camp that’s the last stop before shipping out to Vietnam. We may justifiably knock Joel Schumacher for putting nipples on the Batsuit, but you have to admit that the man can spot on-screen talent (see also McConaughey, Matthew, and the entire cast of “Flatliners”). Aside from this being a gripping, well-acted film with lots of young character actors you may recognize from other things, this – Farrell’s first American movie – makes you understand why Hollywood fell in love with Colin Farrell. (If you get it on DVD, watch it with the director commentary, at least up until the sex scene about 15 minutes in – it’s kind of unintentionally hilarious how Schumacher makes the transition.)
(Tangent: wasn’t McConaughey originally cast as the evil KKK brother in "A Time to Kill" before getting bumped up to the lead, leaving Keifer Sutherland to play the bad guy? Am I the only one imagining if this had never happened, and McConaughey and Sutherland switched career paths? Can’t you just totally see Jack Bauer as a naked bongo-playing stoner? Maybe this is just me…)

“Atonement” (2007)
Another movie I’m about to be very hard on because it’s based on one of my favorite books. In my defense, parts of “Atonement” really do blow pretty hard. It’s not a bad adaptation of the book – the plot follows the novel’s closely, but more importantly, the filmmakers made good choices as to which of the novel’s events to depict. Basically, in the years immediately prior to World War II, a young girl from a wealthy English family who aspires to be a writer spots her older sister (Keira Knightly) and a working-class family friend (James McAvoy) having some sort of altercation she can’t understand. Because, at 13, she’s obviously the world’s leading expert on everything (this part was very accurate), the girl blunders into a situation and sucks everyone in with her, and the consequences ripple on for decades. It’s a deeply moving study of human fallibility. The problem is that it’s directed by Joe Wright, the guy who turned “Pride and Prejudice” into a frakking Harlequin romance. For its first half, “Atonement” is restrained, and I don’t think I’d change a thing about it. Then suddenly Wright flips a switch, and we land in this over-stylized melodrama, epitomized by a roughly half-hour-long tracking shot of the beach at Dunkirk just before the British evacuation. (Michael Bay called, he wants his DeMille Complex back.) That scene is meant to overwhelm me with the war’s human toll, but all it did was distract me by making me wonder if the camera operator got the extra cookie he so richly deserved. I didn’t realize just how much of a momentum-suck that Dunkirk scene was until later, when a character refers to “Queen Elizabeth,” and I stopped the movie to call my mom (my source for anything English) to double-check that QE II didn’t actually take the throne until the 50s, so was this a flub? Or maybe the Queen Mother’s name is Elizabeth, too? Which meant that I had to go Google – at which point it occurred to me that “Atonement” had lost me. I’m thinking I should be invested enough in a film’s story NOT to be thinking about such things right in the middle of it. From there on out I was just waiting for it to be over. (By the way, the ending of the book is SO much more powerful.) (Also by the way…….it’s Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. You’re welcome.)