The heads -- you're lookin' at the heads....

Rating: 8/10 (8 February 2009)

What a movie. Martin Sheen is an anguished Army captain in Vietnam in 1968, ordered to proceed up river to the Cambodian border on a Navy River Patrol Boat and assassinate a Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) who has apparently gone berserk and established his own little, ruthless anti-communist empire in the jungle.
It's a free transposition of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" but that hardly matters. Nor does the overall plot. We already know most of it because some of its features have become integral to our vernacular culture. "I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like -- victory." "The horror. The horror." (Well -- that last is lifted directly from Conrad's novel, but never mind.)
What Stephen Spielberg did so miraculously with light in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," Francis Ford Coppola does with smoke here. All kinds of smoke. Gray smoke from gunfire and explosions. Amber smoke from fires. Pink and lime and lavender smoke from flares and grenades. People stalk slowly through it like images from hell. Boats drift through clouds of it.
The lighting (Vittorio Storaro) and special effects contribute to the impact of the film too. Brando's first appearance in unforgettable chiaroscuro. A burnt orange light illuminates his shaved head from the side and turns the naked scalp into a luminous crescent. Then Brando bows his head, dips his fingers into a bowl of water and flutters his fingertips along the skin as if playing a piano or celesta.
Sheen's boat and its two-man crew glide very slowly into the tiny cove which serves as Brando's main port. The place looks like mannequin factory. There are bodies and body parts strewn about. Bodies that are more or less whole droop from the trees and from the gargoyle monuments that surround the entrance to Brando's dark and beckoning castle. Hundreds of half-naked natives with spears and guns have assembled in silence to greet the boat. Out of this unholy horde dances a crazed photographic journalist, the ever reliably crazed Dennis Hopper. He shouts greetings, shakes hands, welcomes them warmly, but adds in a wary tone, "They think you've come to kill him -- and I hope THAT'S not true." He leads the stunned Sheen through the throng that opens before them. Sheen is gaping at some of the body parts. "The heads -- you're lookin' at the heads! Y'know, sometimes he goes too far, but he'll be the first to admit it, man."
Brando is a warrior and a poet. Near the end, one scene seems to be a T. S. Eliot study group gone awfully wrong. He's a philosopher. "Did you ever think that the middle word of LIFE is IF?" That whole climactic visit to Brando's fortress in the wilderness lifts the movie out of whatever sense of reality it had earlier carried and places it squarely into the surreal. It's just impossible. A viewer can't tell what consequences any given event will precipitate. There are two beheadings and a buffalo having its head half chopped off by the Bontoc Igorots among whom this film was shot. (Only three generations ago, they hunted heads. I was in graduate school with an Igorot whose grandfather had enjoyed such an enterprise.)
It's about as arty a film as you're likely to see, if art means slowly and relentlessly digging beneath the civilized surface of human culture and uncovering the uncoverable nature of humanity itself, and that's not a pretty picture.