Weak Beginning, Strong Middle, Weak Ending

Rating: 6/10 (10 June 2005)

"Casualties of War" forms part of what may be called the cinema's Second Vietnam Cycle. The first came in the late Seventies, immediately after the war itself, with films such as "The Deerhunter", "Coming Home" and "Apocalypse Now". Hollywood then seemed to lose interest in the subject for a few years, but returned to it in the late eighties when there were a number of major Vietnam War films such as "Full Metal Jacket", "Hamburger Hill" and Oliver Stone's trilogy.
The plot centres around five American soldiers who are out on patrol. Their leader, Sergeant Meserve, suggests that they kidnap and rape a young Vietnamese woman, and two of his men eagerly go along with the idea. The others, Privates Diaz and Eriksson, are appalled, and make a pact to oppose the plan. Under pressure from his comrades, however, Diaz gives in and agrees to participate, leaving Eriksson to look on helplessly as the other four men seize the terrified woman from her home and brutally rape her. She is forced by to accompany the men on their patrol, and is later shot and killed by them when her coughing threatens to give them away during an attempted ambush of a band of Viet Cong troops.
Meserve tries to justify his treatment of the girl by claiming that she is a Viet Cong spy, but there is no evidence that she is anything of the sort, and even he himself does not really believe it. The trigger for the incident is Meserve's anger at the death of a comrade in an ambush and at the fact that the Military Police have prevented him from visiting a prostitute, but the underlying reason is that he and his colleagues rape and kill the girl simply because they can, as an expression of the power that they, as armed men, possess over the unarmed villagers. They believe that they will not be punished, and Eriksson's later attempts to have them initially meet with little success, as the officers to whom he speaks are unwilling to take action. The military authorities would prefer to turn a blind eye to war crimes committed by those under their command, believing that to carry out investigations would hamper the conduct of the war and lead to unwelcome publicity. Meserve is regarded as a good soldier, the sort of man that his superiors would be unwilling to lose. He is efficient, brave (we are reminded that on one occasion he saved Eriksson's life) and clearly regarded as having powers of leadership, having been promoted to sergeant at only twenty years of age. A good soldier, however, is not necessarily a good man.
I was interested by the comment from the reviewer who said that this film could have taken place against any background, be it war, college campus or neighbourhood gang. This is partially true. Crimes such as rape can, of course, take place in peacetime as well as wartime, and another movie from the late eighties, "The Accused", took as its theme a gang rape committed by a group of young men in a bar. "Casualties of War", however, is both a film about male violence against women and also something wider than that. It is also a film about how war can lead to a breakdown in civilised values, with soldiers coming to feel that they are immune from the demands of both law and of morality. There is perhaps little about the film that is specific to Vietnam- events similar to those portrayed here have occurred in all wars throughout history- but the unpopularity of that war meant that the film-makers could deal with a subject- war crimes committed by American troops- that in other contexts could have been too controversial to handle. A Second World War film, for example, that showed Allied soldiers raping and murdering a German woman might have been condemned as, at best, unpatriotic and, at worst, pro-Nazi.
I had previously thought of Michael J Fox as a lightweight actor, at his best in comedies and TV sitcoms, so I was surprised to see him taking the lead here as Eriksson. His performance, however, was very good. I was perhaps less impressed by Sean Penn as Meserve, who seemed at times more like a schoolyard bully than a psychopathic war criminal. Penn did, however, have one very good scene where he persuades the other members of his patrol to take part in the kidnap. His superiors were obviously right to think that Meserve had powers of leadership; unfortunately, those powers were applied to perverted ends.
The main fault with the film is its structure. The central part of the film, which documents the actual rape and killing, is very powerful, a harrowing indictment of the brutalities of war. The opening part, however, is slow-moving, and the battle scenes are less convincing than those in, say, "Platoon". I do not agree with the suggestion that I have seen made that the film should have ended with the death of the girl. Given that the film was based on a true story, it was important to show the aftermath of the killings, especially as an important part of the story is the traumatic effect that the incident had on Eriksson, the one 'innocent' member of the patrol. One thing that Fox coveys well is that Eriksson's pursuit of justice is motivated as much by his own feelings of guilt at failing to prevent the woman's death as by moral indignation. The investigation and subsequent court-martial, however, are treated very perfunctorily, and we never really understand why the authorities overcome their initial reluctance to pursue the matter. The opening and closing scenes, which show Eriksson meeting a Vietnamese girl after the war (a prominent newspaper headline referring to Nixon's resignation tells us that the year is 1974), are weak and unnecessary. The result is a film with a weak beginning, strong middle and weak ending. 6/10