Screen
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN REEL POLITICS 'MISS MARY ' 'WEEPING,' & 'PLATOON' M iss Mary workS wen as a personal story but not as the political metaphor intended by Argentine director Maria Luisa Bemberg. To be...
...When Sheen explains that it seems unfair that only the poor had to fight, one black grunt comments, "You've got to be rich to begin with even to think like that...
...Calmly, sadly, he shows the inevitability of radical violence when racists use violence to subvert their own system of law...
...Indeed, its frankness and non-ideological approach to the issues place it among the best movies to date about the war in Vietnam...
...Or they may be inspired to become one...
...Platoon is neither heroical nor satirical but, at its best, tragic...
...It's like a second law of film thermodynamics...
...Most of his background is depicted through the awkward device of letters home to his grandmother (like the parallel figure of the "poet" Craven in book and film of A Walk in the Sun...
...Platoon dares to take on an utter cliche' but ultimately wins its gamble...
...ButPlatoon is also a gripping, powerful tale, and one every American ought to see...
...Oliver Stone's screenplay is sage enough to give us reason to respect Berenger, and to understand Sheen's attraction to him...
...The Argentines ape the English: the family's home, in the middle of the pampas, is schlock neo-Tudor...
...The younger one is more sexually adventurous, and we wonder if Christie suffered for her sins...
...She still has one of the most expressive faces on screen, and her range in the key scene, from prim, governessy propriety to abandoned romantic rapture, extends farther than most other actresses in most other recent films...
...Calley from killing...
...16 January 1987: 17 The members of the platoon also veer toward cliches—only to evade them...
...The larger story meant nothing here...
...To be sure, there is a fertile political context: Julie Christie plays a proper, spinsterly English governess who begins work for a rich Argentine family in the late 1930s, between the beginning of the Second World War and the emergence of Perrih...
...The central character is a staple hero of combat literature since The Red Badge of Courage: a raw, cleancut kid (Charlie Sheen)—a "naif caught up in his first wartime experiences...
...When they get it, the local prosecutor immediately informs his buddy the farmer, whose cronies commit more murders to cover up the initial one...
...it was all Miss Mary's...
...on another, they are not just all poor but predominantly black...
...The film is grisly, violent, and often unpleasant...
...But there is one ominous difference...
...TOM O'BRIEN 18: Commonweal...
...There is also a handsome, lateadolescent son, casting longing sexual glances about...
...In the long run, they create good suspense: we know Christie has lost her job by 1945, but don't know how...
...P latoon, like Place of Weeping, also has a heart large enough to cover a multitude of artistic sins...
...On this level, for us the film functions as unintended time travel: Place of Weeping duplicates the sixties' South...
...A white rural farmer kills one of his black workers when he tries to steal a chicken to supplement some pitifully small'' rations'' 16: Commonweal which substitute for pay...
...The key plot twist occurs when Dafoe saves some Vietnamese villagers from execution by Berenger, an episode that shapes Sheen's ultimate choice between his two mentors...
...On one level, they resemble those typical arrays of World War II "melting pot" Americans from everywhere...
...the language is realistically full of scatology and blasphemy...
...True to Vietnam stories, the platoon is led by an ineffective lieutenant who doesn't know the ropes, and it's battled over by two sergeants who do...
...Even the music distinguishes it: here are no rock "video" sequences, or Wagnerian echoes to equate Americans and Nazis, but Barber's '' Adagio for Strings," an elegiac tribute to everyone's sufferings...
...Yet unlike an anti-war tract, Platoon presents the humanity of the American army...
...unlike Rambo, it sees not just "our boys" but the Asian villagers, too, as victims...
...indeed, the whole Argentine upper class's aping of British atmosphere seems to have included the overheated sexual cumulous cloud that, at least in films, befogs every drawing room...
...Director Darrell Roodt invites us to consider the closing apocalypse as a probable symbol of his country's fate...
...But Stone redeems the Galahad motif with good doses of sarcastic wit...
...In the last decade, Vietnam has resulted mostly in cartoons: witness Rambo's attempt to take everything out of context and present the North Vietnamese as jungle incompetents and Americans as intuitive guerrilla fighters...
...That film, brilliant as it was (and with the "naif" played by Charlie Sheen's father, Martin) was not just out of context, but out of Africa...
...Writer/director Stone served as a "grunt" and it shows...
...Miss Mary has one other defect, which turns ultimately into a strength...
...A journalist sent from the capital to investigate black tribal fighting is informed of the crime by a local black church worker, the only activist around...
...It could have no better subtitle than one of those interstate highway rebuilding signs:'' Your tax dollars at work...
...Bemberg layers on so many time references and flashbacks at the beginning of the film that they may confuse some viewers...
...The oldest flightily models herself on Isadora Duncan and shows frequent signs of instability...
...Far better than the manipulations of Sylvester Stallone, Platoon will win real sympathy for American "grunts...
...Platoon thus restores the fullness of history: this is exactly what happened at My Lai when other American soldiers tried to stop Lt...
...The physics of such situations is always simple: the more inhibition, the more desire...
...For Americans, the film provides de'jd vu with a twist...
...But Bemberg's attempt to parallel micro- and macrocosmie stories of repression and revolution remains at the level of pure theoretical diagram, not emotional reality...
...Observing the events are radical revolutionaries armed with machine guns, and they enact their own brand of justice when local "white" justice fails...
...American audiences who see this film may remember, despite current propaganda, how locally oppressed minorities here were often saved by the "outside agitator...
...it may even help the puritanically anti-military among us understand the excesses to which troops were driven in Southeast Asia...
...Often it is said that it takes some time for great art to emerge from a war, for example, the spate of memoirs of World War I toward the end of the 1920s...
...we're even told that he dropped out of college in order to enlist, a gesture that earns him the nickname of "crusader" among his battle-hardened comrades...
...The church pastor, a kindly Episcopal priest, cautions the journalist and his assistant to do nothing until there is absolute proof...
...Her wards include two young girls...
...Indeed, perhaps one ought to regard this film—the first made by a multi-racial South African team on the recent troubles there— as simply a very powerful educational experience and moral warning...
...UnlikeRambo, Platoon presents the enemy as able fighters...
...Although crudely made and lamely acted, it compels attention in its final half because of its South African setting...
...Platoon dares to take up particulars and present Vietnam from a soldier's point of view...
...True to war and film tradition, one is a sadist (Tom Berenger), the other a great jungle fighter who questions the war with increasing intensity (William Dafoe...
...Place of Weeping makes you forgive its art for its politics...
...The senora, in Christie's words, is "arrogant but helpless," especially to stop the father from philandering...
...Platoon's writer and director Oliver Stone bludgeons the film with images of Sheen's youth and innocence...
...SCREEN REEL POLITICS 'MISS MARY ' 'WEEPING,' & 'PLATOON' M iss Mary workS wen as a personal story but not as the political metaphor intended by Argentine director Maria Luisa Bemberg...
...Even among the stereotypical figures nuances abound: one vicious "cracker" is played by Kevin Dillon with just enough wild glee to avoid our hatred...
...But was the anti-war Apolcalypse Now that different when it adapted Heart of Darkness to Vietnam...
...There are many ways to get fired while working in such an explosive atmosphere, and Bemberg's best art consists of concealing the cause until the moment that Christie's acting saves it from being a cliche...
Vol. 114 • January 1987 • No. 1
