The Way to Heal: A DVD Extras review

Rating: 7/10 (13 November 2009)

War is hell, but for fans of Oliver Stone's tribute to the foot soldiers of the Vietnam War, this Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Ultimate Edition DVD (2006) is sheer Hanoi Heaven. Platoon: The Special Edition was originally released in 2001 - so what else is new? And is it worth flogging your old one on eBay to make room for this little war baby? The resounding answer comes with all the force of a purple-faced drill sergeant screaming suggestive remarks about one's sister in your face. That's a yes, then. Yes what? Yes Sir.
The extras, including TV spots, photo galleries and trailers, are legion - but the selling point here (aside from a cleaned-up DTS Surround Sound) are two new featurettes: at nearly one-hour long, 'Tour Of The Inferno' is a superb making of film directed by Charles Kiselyak, who also directed the marvellous One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest documentary 'Completely Cuckoo'. 'Tour...' begins with the young Stone "entertaining ideas of suicide", until Vietnam offered him an escape route; and Oliver was ravenous for it. His resulting screenplay may have authentically captured the first-hand experience of in-country combat but, as producer Arnold Kopelson notes, the script was initially rejected out of hand by almost everybody.
We then trace the movie from pre-production on, relating how the actors spent two weeks at boot camp in the Philippines under the rigorous, regimented auspices of military adviser Captain Dale Dye of the US Marine Corps (retired), who'd spent three months in Vietnam, "almost all that time on the line".
Willem Dafoe recalls contracting jungle fever while Johnny Depp remembers eating something called "bean component" for dinner. ("I'd rather have eaten my own socks."). Stone and Dyer's commitment to realism ensured production was equally fraught for the virgin soldiers, who remember Stone bullying, cursing and generally hounding them as far as they could physically and psychologically go.
Meanwhile, the short featurette 'Preparation For The Nam' describes the reality of training from the veteran's perspective. ("It was hard to sit and listen to some of those sergeants try and lecture, coz they were terrible speakers.") Stone, who arrived for his own tour of duty in 1967 on his 21st birthday, provides an intensely personal audio commentary, reeling off his experiences in synch with the action, and at times identifying so closely with Sheen that the film and his voice-over resembles the second-by-second memoir-cum-confession that, for all intents, it is. "There's my command sergeant... a fat drunk." He's re-living it all over again, and it makes for compelling listening. "These boys returned old and fractured souls", says Stone. "Part of them was dead forever." And his near-monosyllabic voice-over is most effective when describing the horrors he's seen and carried out; alternately "making friends and jokes with North Vietnamese villagers - and killing them."
For first-person insight, it's also hard to beat Dye's audio commentary. Part Rambo, part drama teacher, Dye describes how he kept the actors in character throughout - and Tom Berenger in particular ("He would have made a damn fine platoon sergeant.") Dye recalls cutting the cast's "Hollywood hair off - something I enjoyed immensely", and, "using what I call field experience", jumped in that bodybag himself in the opening sequence to add verisimilitude.
According to Captain Dye, he and Oliver had differences of opinion over Stone's approach to directing - "me screaming and yelling and calling him 'Ho Chi Minh' and Oliver calling me 'John Wayne'". And it's certainly disquieting to hear him describe the climactic bloodbath as "beautiful, man. Hear that sound? That's a bayonet in the chest. We actually did that by stabbing a watermelon. With a bayonet."
But to return to the real reason we're here, and the reason Platoon was written: catharsis. 'One War, Many Stories' finds a roomful of veterans treated to a special screening-cum-gestalt therapy, moderated by one Dr James Lull (formerly Army 1st Cavalry Division 1963-1966). Dr Lull invites the vets to use the opportunity to express their feelings and recollections about Vietnam, prompted by what they've just seen. Bill Hutton (USMC Battalion 4th Marines) recalls "the uncommon courage of some of the people I saw"; while Odas Flake (Charlie Company 1965-1966) just thanks God he served when he did, "when it was a true war, with good leaders - there was no smoking dope in the tents or in the bush".
Well, mea culpa interjects Paul Gold (Army 1st Cavalry 1965-1968), "I was one of the guys who was smoking dope and was using heroin, and I remember getting a whipping from a bunch of Southern white guys coz I hung out with the black guys - they had the parties and the drugs." Soon, the screening room is filled with animated conversation, soul-searching, a few tears - and healing laughter. There may be an untapped vortex of howling pain present, but these guys are mostly keeping it together; if there's a Travis Bickle among them, he's probably curled in a foetal position under his chair, softly banging his head on the carpet and weeping soundlessly. As Stone, with "the soul of a murderer" soberly states, "It's better to talk. That's the way to heal."