An interviewer once asked Sam Fuller, who made some of the toughest, most groundbreaking war movies of the ’50s and ’60s, how he injected such gritty truth and realistic violence into two-fisted actioners like The Steel Helmet and Merrill’s Marauders. Fuller dismissed the question. “I lie with a camera,” he admitted in his staccato style. “I lie like hell. I don’t want the audience to leave. Soldiers just fall? They never fall. There’s parts of them. The head is there...the feet are there. Bam! Bam! They’re pieces of people.”
The struggle Fuller describes has confounded moviemakers since the dawn of film: to convey truths about war within the context of popular entertainment. How can a movie capture honestly the quick flurry of small battles that make up a war? (“They never last more than five minutes,” Fuller swears. “The gun barrel gets too hot.”) How can a movie remain both watchable and true to the nature of war—especially when, as Fuller suggests, audiences can’t handle the bloody truth?
Courage Under Fire, a new war film from director Edward Zwick (Glory) and screenwriter Patrick Sheane Duncan (Mr. Holland’s Opus), offers an effective approach. Reviving the spirit of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Rashomon, Zwick and Duncan tell and retell one (fictional) incident in the Gulf War from several different viewpoints, altering the depiction of events with each storyteller. The technique is used to imply that reality, at least in wartime, is an unknowable hybrid of honesty and excuses.
At the center of Courage Under Fire is Capt. Karen Walden (Meg Ryan), a Medivac chopper pilot whose copter and crew saved the lives of some cornered U.S. soldiers in the Gulf War before crashing. What’s in dispute is how much responsibility Capt. Walden had in the rescue, and what happened after the helicopter was shot down—a grim turn of events that ultimately claimed Walden’s life. Was she decisive? Hysterical? Superheroic? Or even traitorous? Regardless of the facts, the White House, sensing a PR coup, begins lining Walden up posthumously to become the nation’s first female recipient of the Medal of Honor.
In charge of determining Walden’s eligibility is Col. Nat Serling (Denzel Washington), a career soldier strapped with his own burden of scrutiny and self-doubt. While commanding a tank battalion in the heat of battle in Desert Storm, Serling accidentally ordered the shelling of a U.S. tank that had crossed enemy lines. Ever since, despite the efforts of an intrepid reporter (Scott Glenn), the Pentagon has buried the “friendly fire” incident and Serling with it. Consumed by guilt and alcohol, Serling nevertheless refuses to treat the investigation as the rubber-stamping his superiors want. He seeks the truth in the Walden case, hoping he’ll find a way to deal with his own shame.
Denzel Washington makes a fine and pointed Colonel Serling—a shell-shocked man in search of a workable code of behavior. Washington’s greatest strength as an actor has always been the many faces he presents within a single role. In most of his films, he shows one side to white America and other, varied sides to black America; in Courage Under Fire, he shows different faces to his family, his superiors, and the subordinate soldiers who aid his investigation. There’s a scene early in Courage Under Fire that shows Washington’s style in miniature: Serling surreptitiously pours a drink in his bedroom when his wife walks in, and he flinches slightly before seeing her, as if thinking, “Who is this, and what will he or she make of my behavior? Who do I have to be now?”
While the Army manipulates the facts of his own case, Serling strives to uncover some truth, somewhere. Every hard question he asks of Walden’s crew, he asks because he wants an answer to his own dilemma—he wants to hear that combat is confusing and chaotic, requiring snap decisions that may be right and wrong at the same time. Instead, he uncovers tension and dissent among the surviving members of Walden’s crew. Depending on who’s talking, Walden is either a hero or a coward, and the discrepancy in the stories seems to hide a larger secret.
We eventually learn the secret, and we hear what may be the true version of Walden’s story—although the “official” version is as unconvincing as the jumbled versions. Because we never learn much about who Walden really is—other than that, as played by Ryan, she has a terrible Southern accent—her behavior seems too convenient. In fact, the entire concluding passages of Courage Under Fire are too pat, wrapping up Serling’s story, Walden’s story, and even the reporter’s story in what amounts to one rushed scene.
Still, the easiness of the conclusion hardly obscures the film’s merits. The details of Walden’s life and the incidents in the Gulf are really just a hook, a Soldier’s Story-like mystery on which Zwick and Duncan can hang their larger points about the vagaries of war. History, as we often hear, is written by the winners; but even among the winners there are losers, and it’s these people’s contribution to history that usually gets forgotten. Courage Under Fire has a sure understanding of the desperate, double-edged acts that occur when men and women are asked by their country to kill. The theme is so tough and so compelling that it even weathers the film’s closing, a feel-good payoff that puts too happy a face on what has gone before. (During the patriotic fervor of the finale, I kept wondering what the Iraqi version of the Walden case would look like.)
Almost all the glad-handing is redeemed, though, by a graceful final shot that drives home a point only suggested previously—that Serling and Walden both faced their moments of crisis on the same stretch of desert on consecutive days in February. The shot implies that they’re part of a larger series of incidents, in the Gulf War and in all wars, where the action got hot, the bullets flew, and only afterward could the participants try to sort out what happened. At the movie’s end, if we don’t feel completely convinced or satisfied by the whole story, perhaps the real point of Courage Under Fire has been made.—Noel Murray
Dollhouse of Horrors
As Dawn Wiener, the 11-year-old heroine of the extraordinary new movie Welcome to the Dollhouse, the young actress Heather Matarazzo embodies the agonies of junior high school so vividly that her performance—like junior high—becomes a kind of endurance test. Stuck in an institutional New Jersey suburb and ignored by her parents, Dawn spends her evenings sandwiched at home between an overachieving brother and an infernally cute moppet of a sister. Those are the good moments. At school she’s tormented, terrorized, and ridiculed by classmates, from a fiendish, conniving sprite named Lolita (Victoria Davis) to a troubled bully (Brendan Sexton Jr.) who expresses his unspoken feelings for her by threatening her with rape.
That Welcome to the Dollhouse is a comedy—and an adult one at that—may come as a surprise. That it’s so consistently funny, touching, mortifying, astute, and original is more surprising still. The writer and director, Todd Solondz, captures the indignities of junior-high life with such cruel precision that wincing is as appropriate as laughter. Our immersion in Dawn’s siege mentality is total: The movie is shot from Dawn’s point of view, so that every adult is seen as uncaring, every classmate a creep, every situation a potential threat.
Is this unfair? Probably, but from what little memory I haven’t repressed of junior high, it’s also painfully accurate. Solondz clearly identifies with his heroine, but he isn’t dumb: He knows that her 11-year-old perspective is warped, and that there’s a difference between the world she sees and the world that is. Dawn’s a lousy judge of character—she swoons over the two most harmful boys in her life—and she lashes out at kids weaker or less popular than she is. But Solondz sympathizes with all kids trapped in junior high’s demeaning parade of rituals: feeling self-conscious and unpopular, wearing god-awful polyester get-ups, suffering through humiliating class assemblies and school functions. A strain of pitiful tenderness courses through the film.
The movie lapses into unnecessary snideness only once or twice, which is remarkable, considering the pitch-darkness of the movie’s humor. And Heather Matarazzo’s performance is phenomenal. She registers each new calamity from behind Coke-bottle lenses with a look of utter dismay—eyes indignantly wide, mouth open, shoulders hunched. She draws you into her worst-case-scenario childhood so completely that when the movie ends you breathe a sigh of relief, grateful to be released once more from adolescent lock-up. Welcome to the Dollhouse is so good that it reminds you of another miserable aspect of preteen life: not being able to get into R-rated movies.—Jim Ridley
In Brief
♦ Eraser, directed by Charles Russell, features explosions, disemboweling by alligator, and a hero who works with the mob against the government and then later commits what amounts to a calculated murder of the villain. And yet, despite the violence and vigilante fascism, Eraser is fundamentally harmless and even fun. Why? Maybe it’s the deadpan good humor of star Arnold Schwarzenegger, who never once gives his character’s profession—superhuman enforcer of the federal witness protection program—the blustery, ridiculous portrayal it would seem to demand. Maybe it’s the fakey flames, the cheesy blue-screen effects, and the not-exactly-fearsome Hanna-Barbera-esque gators—all of which prove that even an $80-million-plus budget can only go as far as imagination and ingenuity will take it.
Most likely, though, the movie’s almost charming feel comes from the affectless way it grinds out every action movie cliché of the past decade without a hint of irony. About halfway through the film, soon after the clumsiest product placement in cinema history—villain James Caan handing a can of Pepsi to a lackey and saying, “Here, you’ll enjoy this”—it’s clear that the filmmakers don’t have any mean-spirited intentions. They just don’t know any better.
♦ The homogenized critical take on Phenomenon, directed by Jon Turtletaub from a Gerald DiPego script, has been that the film is mildly enjoyable fluff, given substance by a stellar John Travolta performance but marred by dangerous anti-intellectual sentiment. This is not entirely accurate. Yes, the film is sappy—how could a movie about a simple mechanic who becomes a genius after being zapped by a beam of light not be sappy? And yet the sweet caramelized tone of Phenomenon is also effective and entertaining.
What I take issue with is the idea that the film somehow celebrates dumbness (à la Forrest Gump). When Travolta’s George Malley magically gains enlightenment, he doesn’t deny the power of knowledge, and neither does the movie. In fact, in a riveting speech by Robert Duvall (who plays a local doctor), Phenomenon chastises those who would be unimpressed by the gifted; who would rather tear someone brilliant down to their level rather than rise to his. At any rate, the one point where I can toe the critical line is in the assessment of Travolta’s performance. He’s enchanting, as humble and fascinated with the wonders of life as we hope we would be, were we similarly blessed. Travolta creates a George Malley so likable and vital that we believe he exists even when he’s not onscreen; when the movie is over, we miss him. For mildly enjoyable fluff, I’d say that’s a pretty impressive feat.—Noel Murray
