Screen:
Baumann, Paul
SCREEN
COMBUSTIBLE VIGILANTES
'CASUALTIES OF WAR' & 'BATMAN'
Director Brian DePalma, who can track and dolly and splatter blood with the best of them, brings an uncharacteristic moral fervor to...
...He is filling in for Tom O'Brien, who is on vacation.Brien, who is on vacation...
...Kurtz...
...Penn's bluster is too studied...
...But if anyone can hold our attention while putting over a stark moral proposition, Fox, with his open but knowing face, can...
...Whether he will have the moral and psychological strength to resist Meserve's intimidation is the more compelling question...
...DePalma wants a tighter focus...
...The Joker, with his twisted features, psychotic ditherings, and obscene confidences, is an old and somewhat tattered piece of material...
...When trussed up in leotards and plastic bat ears, he's formidable...
...Worst of all, he talks out of the side of his mouth in a kind of garbled slur, a cross between Marlon Brando's "Godfodda" and one of the Dead End Kids...
...He's Genghis Khan," proclaims the most dim-witted of his men, and a noble savage beyond the reach of ordinary laws...
...His vision of the futuristic comic-book city is drawn with a precocious schoolboy's determination to impress, and it does...
...Nicholson has been leering and raving like this since he puffed on that fatal joint in Easy Rider...
...These are unlikely sentiments to come out of this character's mouth...
...As his ever-eager subordinate Corporal Clark (Don Harvey) tells the board of court-marshal, "If you throw guys like us in the stockade, you're helping no one but the Viet Cong...
...Nicholson needs someone as wantonly charismatic as himself-someone like Palance...
...Keaton's few appearances as Bruce Wayne, the millionaire civic do-gooder Batman reverts to in the morning, are less interesting...
...The envy of every urban car-owner, it hermetically seals itself up when left on the street...
...There is an operatic excess and truth in her death that focuses the mind on the enormity of evil in ways only a few movies can...
...He will be back in this suit again soon...
...This is kidnapping, isn't it...
...After all, what else explains the suits, the cave life, the appetite for violence, or the polished collection of medieval armor...
...Bad guy Sean Penn (Colors) is set opposite fresh-faced Michael J. Fox, the All-American charmer who wooed and won the nation for seven years on TV' s Family Ties and then gilded the lily with Back to the Future...
...Eriksson is torn between the loyalty soldiers rightfully expect from each other and the unmistakable demands of conscience...
...True, screenwriter Rabe gives him some crushing and ingenuous lines...
...Escher, Batman obviously does...
...Casualties of War falters, I think, in imposing the relatively sophisticated vocabulary of sexual politics on the rape scene...
...DePalma succeeds brilliantly, however, in sustaining the long, nauseating terror of the woman's sexual torture and eventual murder...
...So the straightforward narrative of Casualties of War is disarming, as though the Rolling Stones had turned to folk music...
...With Jack Nicholson's clown suits and its stunning vertiginous cityscape out of M.C...
...But in his lickerish and rowdy way, he still makes it work...
...No one will mistake director Tim Burton's (Bee-tlejuice) mock comic-book epic for anything but a gay bauble, but Batman does dazzle the eye and numb the brain in a pleasing fashion...
...Keaton obviously took Nicholson's advice to heart, and he doesn't try to fight the suit...
...Having Wayne sleep hanging upside down from a metal bar is a nice touch, however...
...There is a rare moral and theatrical eloquence here...
...Meserve's speech, in which he metaphorically equates male sexuality with weaponry and the instruments of war with children's playthings, is too rhetorical...
...Batman suffers from too much Joker and not enough straight men...
...Fox plays Army Pfc Eriksson, a raw recruit plunged into the heart of darkness only weeks after arriving in Vietnam...
...He is, it is broadly hinted at, tempted by the forces of darkness...
...Deftly, Fox gives us all of this modest young man's doubts and fears as well as his stubborn, almost childlike refusal to capitulate...
...With films like Carrie, Body Double, and The Untouchables, DePalma established himself as an extraordinary visual stylist...
...Equally strained are the sexual taunts and threats to which Eriksson is subjected...
...Physically, he isn't as overbearing as he should be...
...Fox, whose considerable comic gifts might have marked him popularly as a lightweight, does better...
...Keaton's impersonation of the righteous nocturnal crusader is not bad...
...It's a powerful movie and a chilling indictment...
...In Penn's uncertain hands, this familiar movie warrior becomes a caricature of the sadistic NCO of military lore...
...Casualties of War does not try to capture the chaos and horror of combat in Vietnam with the sweeping assurance of Oliver Stone's Platoon...
...He's a peculiarly self-conscious kind of monster...
...Nicholson, who eliminates rival gangster Palance early on, is reported to have told co-star Michael Keaton that some roles require that an actor just "let the suit do the work...
...Even in the midst of the absolute savagery of a guerrilla war, her murder cries out for justice and atonement...
...or Shirley MacLaine?-to fight the camera for...
...Meserve, a twenty-year-old combat veteran and squad leader, has lost whatever fragile grasp he had of the difference between combat and murder, the enemy and the innocent...
...Even the Batmobile has a winning, campy Sphinx-like quality...
...Batman's dark Manichaean-or is it only mammalian?- soul is the subject of dramatic insinuations...
...It is one of Casualties of War's great achievements that the rape scene, which easily could have been sensationalized, deepens but does not compete with the ultimate horror of her murder...
...As Nicholson's lunatic Joker observes about his adversary, Batman has some wonderful toys...
...But the uncertainties and inconclusiveness of the Vietnam war and the constant horror of combat turn him against all moral authority...
...A ny movie that can dispense with the services of the magnificently flat-nosed Jack Palance without breaking stride must have something supernatural going for it...
...Adapted by playwright David Rabe (Streamers) from Daniel Lang's factual 1969 report on the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a Vietnamese girl by a group of American soldiers, this tragic story is boldly realized on the screen...
...he asks Meserve, and later, "Maybe it (doing the right thing) matters more than we ever know...
...Burton puts lots of energy and expert sleight of hand into this entertainment, and he delivers on time and while it's still hot...
...In fact, this resourceful actor is overwhelming as the scourge of hapless Gotham City...
...there's something worried and rabbit-like in his eyes, and he snarls too much...
...But he doesn't quite make it...
...Due to the premeditated and gratuitous nature of the atrocity, Eriksson's choice almost seems too clear-cut...
...In extracting his personal revenge against the Vietnamese, Meserve will brook no opposition from those under his command...
...Batman is thick through the middle, but the belfry climax is a visual treat and a bright comic Punch-and-Judy show...
...Meserve is a brave man and a killer, indispensable traits in any soldier, and qualities for which his men respect and follow him...
...SCREEN COMBUSTIBLE VIGILANTES 'CASUALTIES OF WAR' & 'BATMAN' Director Brian DePalma, who can track and dolly and splatter blood with the best of them, brings an uncharacteristic moral fervor to Casualties of War...
...Penn plays Sergeant Meserve, an all but cannibalistic Mr...
...This combustible vigilante would seem to be a role Penn, known for his volatility on and off the screen, should slip into effortlessly...
...DePalma begins with a shameless bit of type-casting...
...Keaton's Promethean jaw seems strangely menacing, and when he drops The Joker into a vat of green acid something wild and weird is happening behind the mask...
...But it is best not to delve too deeply into the engima of this kind of goodness in the daylight...
...PAUL BAUMANN Paul Baumann is a staff writer and movie critic for The Day in New London, Connecticut...
...All of this would have been more effective as subtext...
...Wayne's pensive seduction of inquiring photographer Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger) is all a coy flapping of wings, without much danger of rabies shots in the future...
...Although the story moves and the pictures flow with DePalma's usual fluidity, the film has a restrained-indeed, a juridical- tone...
...And what suits...
Vol. 116 • September 1989 • No. 16
