Debunking a lot of dangerous myths

Rating: 9/10 (31 July 2001)

In PLATOON, director Oliver Stone gave us a look at the Vietnam war from ground zero. And in BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, he gives us another man's view of the war, like Stone a soldier who had become disenfranchised by the war.
The man at the center of this true-life story is Ron Kovic, a Marine who believed in the myths of American might, the honor of serving one's country, John Wayne, and the threat that communism posed. But in a firefight on a Vietnamese beach during Tet, Kovic was shot by a VC bullet and paralysed from the waist down. As a result, he would never be able to walk again and would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Even worse, when he returned from Vietnam, his rehabilitation was painful, and so was his coming to terms with the fact that many of his friends in his hometown of Massapequa, New York had grown either indifferent or hostile to him. Once a love-it-or-leave-it patriot, Kovic came to realize he could be a force for Good by protesting what the Vietnam war had done, not only to his fellow servicemen but to America.
This is what is at the heart of BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, and Stone (with help from Kovic, who collaborated with the director on the screenplay, which was based on his 1976 memoir) brings all the memories back of those traumatic years in American history. Tom Cruise gives a fine performance as Kovic.
Even more so, Stone does the right thing by debunking a lot of dangerous myths about America's anti-communist paranoia and our worshipping of John Wayne. Unlike a previous reviewer of this film, I am of the belief that America never fully understood communism as anything more than a threat to itself, and our inability to see beyond that surface to its inherent weaknesses is what led us to the utter tragedy of Vietnam. Furthermore, basing our patriotism on an actor like John Wayne, who NEVER served his country in reality, also turned out to be part of the recipe for disaster.
BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, in my opinion, is NOT an Anti-American film but a film fundamentally about the loss of human innocence. It does not make service to one's country dishonorable. But it does rightly destroy those myths that destroyed our innocence as a nation in the 1960s and 1970s. And on those counts alone, it is an American masterpiece.