Maybe De Palma's Best

Rating: Null/10 (7 May 2004)

It's the only film of De Palma's that I've seen that doesn't imitate Hitchcock, engage in shameless self indulgence, or pander to its audience. ("Pander." Interesting word, from a character in Chaucer who acted as a sexual intermediary.)
This is structured more like a three-act play than a traditional movie. (1) Fox is introduced to the other members of his squad and gets in a fire fight. (2) The squad kidnap a girl, take her into the bush, rape her and kill her, and engaged in another fire fight. (3) Fox tries to blow the whistle but the higher up the ladder he goes, the more angry the resistance becomes, until he finally sees the four criminals brought to trial.

It is not an epic war movie full of majestic music and heroic acts and a cast of thousands, but it belongs up there with "Platoon" and the others. It's quite well done.
The acting is uniformly good. Fox is fine as a short, shiny faced, humanitarian newbie who answers to a higher authority than he can find easily in the military chain of command. Penn adopts a New York accent that is so thick that it's sometimes hard to follow, but he puts a lot of energy into the role of sergeant, almost to the point of hamminess. His men are well-differentiated by the script -- one a savage and stupid killer, one a remorseful Hispanic, and another newly arrived grunt who goes along willingly because he's been led to believe that this is the way things are done. The Vietnamese girl is as good as any of the men. She appears in two roles, as the victim and, later, as a college student who has a brief, understanding exchange with Fox.
In many ways this is a far more shocking movie than any that De Palma has come up with, before or since. The girl is beautiful, fine-boned, and has long black Asian hair with reddish highlights. Her suffering during the trek into the bush, in her bare feet, carrying the men's gear on her bleeding back, is palpable. After being gang banged she huddles in a dark corner and sobs abjectly. Fox approaches her and she is jolted upward with fear. And we see not the face of the pretty young girl but a battered bloody swollen toothless mask. The scene is light years away from Angie Dickinson getting slashed with a razor in an elevator while the audience thrills.
There is another scene that is outstanding, a kind of denouement. Fox is drunk and is queried by a friendly chaplain. Having been ignored before, he spills out his hopeless story once again. De Palma dissolves from Fox's stricken face to the court martial of the four men. It's another shocker, the more effective for not being underlined. Instead of the four men we have seen before, sweating and unkempt, in dirty fatigues, swearing abominably and threatening Fox, we see them cleaned up in starched kakhis, wearing their campaign ribbons and insignia. And we are forced to the realization that these murderers and rapists, whom we have taken to be nothing more than an anarchic group of bums, are in fact representatives of the U. S. Army and are subject to its laws. (De Palma doesn't show the court itself, just the defendants responding to questions.) They have changed, and yet not changed. The uncomprehending stupdity remains, and the simmering desperation. Penn's sergeant is only twenty years old.
The scene with the Vietnamese student at the end is a necessary catharsis. Fox is on a train and after she gets off, he notices that she has left a scarf behind. He retrieves the scarf and hurries after her, calling out in Vietnamese. She smiles and asks him, "Do I remind you of someone?" His distress becomes plain, and she guesses its source and asks, "Did you have a bad dream? I think it's over now." Brief but touching.
De Palma should get a decoration too because he has disregarded his cheesier tendencies as a director. Another De Palma might have handled that rape scene quite differently, as an opportunity for the audience to identify with the rapists and a chance to display some succulent female flesh. (Here are her nipples. See how purple they look?) But not here. It's a movie made by a grown up, for grown ups.