"Who's gonna love me now.....?"

Rating: 10/10 (10 August 2007)

I waited until August 2007 to see this film and I'm sorry I waited so long. Stone's films usually are so strong that when they enter the mass market the ripples are large, his messages often creating feverish backlash. Few are left on the fence and like Michael Moore's films, they are polarizing, entertaining, often jarring and disturbing. Stone is a man who was in Viet Nam and saw it all up close. As such he was well suited to comment on the war and comment he did over several excellent films. Ron Kovic's story was an appropriate addition to Stone's collection of 'Nam films, coming as it did only three years after his seminal "Platoon".
There have been many Vietnam war films made and this film is certainly one of the most moving I've seen. It is always tempting to get drawn into clichés about war, using stereotypes as a replacement for depth in writing and insight. Stone is a fine writer and director. Along with Kovic's own words and experience, this film manages to honor the appropriate focus, which is Kovic's journey into a drama that began as a patriotic desire to do the right thing. What is remarkable about Kovic's journey is how much he matures in such a short time and how he managed to change his mind about a war that he volunteered to enter. Like so many of his generation, he was initially convinced that Viet Nam was a far flung battle between American style freedom and lifestyles and the oppressive and expanding web of communism. That these ideas were a leftover of the anxieties and illusions of the Cold War was not apparent at that time. In fact one could honestly say that America had not really admitted how lost it was in Indochina until an aged and contrite Robert McNamara recently wrote how his generation of leaders had been completely wrong about Vietnam. There has not been a more socially divisive war since Vietnam and it's hard to argue that there will be one again. Coming as it did as a huge change in society evolved, the war became the ultimate metaphor for all that was wrong with the American vision. Gone were the halcyon days of the American's as liberators, beloved in lands across the world as World War 2 ended. Now the nightly news showed atrocities with American soldiers as the perpetrators. Kovic's tour of duty shadowed all of these changes. His treatment by an underfunded and somewhat indifferent veterans hospital only added to the process of disillusionment and bitterness that was to lead him to completely transform his attitudes towards the war. That he was abused, spat at and beaten by those who would not listen to his anti-war words finalized and crystallized his transformation from soldier to anti-war activist. All of this came at a huge cost to himself.
Whoever said Tom Cruise was not a great actor should see this film. Consider that he was all of 27 years old when the film was released and watch how brave his performance was. His ability to travel from starry eyed child of the 50's, his head full of the previous generations glory at bringing liberation to millions, his belief that communists were the evil empire, all the way through purgatory into realizing that there was no truth to this vision. Cruise gives a stupendous and raw performance, holding back nothing, tearing open his emotions to reveal the depth of Kovic's spiral into total despair.
Ah, then there is Willem Dafoe. His character, so completely destroyed by the ravages of what he had done as a soldier, so aflame in self loathing and grief, he can no longer even recognize that "Kovic" is a mirror image. The scene of them spitting on each other, wrestling each other out of their wheelchairs is so tragically upsetting that one wants to avert the eyes to see such pain.
This is a film to watch several more times. If there are finer essays on the loss of dreams, the transformation of America into a frightening military powerhouse, equally as intimidating and dangerous as they themselves feared the Russians were, than I do not know of it. There is much in this film to consider and given our current state of yet another American disaster (Iraq and Afghanistan), a film that has not aged one drop. A triumph for Stone, Kovic, Cruise and Defoe.