Screen:
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN AT WAR WITH OURSELVES 'GLORY' & 'FOURTH OF JULY' The story of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers has already been told in one of our great American poems, Robert Lowell's "For the Union...
...In any case, Stone and Kovic obviously saw that the best way to press their case was to use someone all-American...
...Born is Kovic's "up from militarism," a portrayal of the hard process of dealing with injury, accepting his past, and growing into an antiwar activist...
...enlists in the Marines...
...then, during Tet, takes a bullet in the back that leaves him paralyzed for life...
...Broderick may irk some viewers...
...no one thought "coloreds" had the discipline and courage...
...The drama is also weakened by Stone's fondness for bluster, forced symbols, and blurry parallels between war and sex...
...This is not just a work of history or military history...
...Glory reconstructs some harsh truths about the war too long swept under the magnolia blossoms of Tara...
...SCREEN AT WAR WITH OURSELVES 'GLORY' & 'FOURTH OF JULY' The story of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers has already been told in one of our great American poems, Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead...
...Awkward at first, his portrayal eventually takes...
...Its combat scenes, aidedbyre-enactorsat 1988's 125th anniversary of Gettysburg, are shot mostly in medium range to accentuate the closeness of nineteenth-century battle...
...Except for World War II, no conflict cost more American lives or more gravely threatened real national security...
...To many young people today, Vietnam is the only history they want to hear more about, the key ancestral memory...
...The Vietnam scenes also show a sure hand: Stone shoots on a beach late in the day, using a filter that accentuates the glare...
...Good...
...In a way, Glory is about a terrible lost opportunity...
...To make Born, Cruise declined a high advance...
...as played by Broderick, he realizes that they have to attain higher standards even to get to fight...
...Cruise, expanding on what he showed in Rain Man, makes these scenes compellingly pathetic...
...Glory doesn't pretend many Northerners were noble on racial issues, except maybe Shaw, whose letters are one of the film's sources...
...It is told again in Glory, which, somewhere midway, becomes the first American movie to brush greatness since The Godfather...
...But something beyond pregnant silence helps to make issues universal...
...Washington's awkward speech and strong conclusion spell out the stakes in the war...
...But Glory does claim that the war represented a chance for blacks to assert themselves...
...What are the film's defects...
...In scenes between Washington and Broderick, larger issues are quietly raised: what is the future of black-white relations, how does America "get clean" again...
...But Shaw did...
...Shaw was the 54th's leader, and, naturally, no black officers were allowed...
...As James Allen MacPherson wrote in 1988's Battle Cry of Freedom, the issue was one state's right-to hold humans in bondage...
...the final shot symbolizes its subtext...
...Kovic barged into the 1972 Republican National Convention to protest Nixon's policies, then was invited to speak at the 1976 Democratic Convention, the two sequences that conclude the film...
...he need only blow his stack once to command obedience...
...But it may remind us-current events notwithstanding-that the phrase "just cause" at least once had meaning...
...as with his jungle scenes in Platoon, you understand the terror of fighting when you can't see anything...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...If only, at some points, it had been more explicit...
...Glory doesn't mince images on the horror of battle...
...Still, focusing mostly on privates, Glory is a no-fuss example of how to teach inclusive history and document a minority group role in preserving America...
...Matthew Broderick plays their colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, scion of rich Boston abolitionists...
...Movies aren't plays...
...the Confederacy issued orders for immediate execution of any blacks in uniform...
...As he writes in the January 8-15 New Republic, the 54th knew this...
...But in its midsection Born falters...
...The center of Born provides a strong antidote to glamorizing war, the kind of garish, gory material that Stone never fails to deliver...
...The real-life, episodic flow of events causes problems...
...Casting Broderick marks no attempt to impose a white presence into a black story (as in Cry Freedom or Mississippi Burning...
...he gives Shaw a stiff, almost antique rectitude...
...Mark Twain once joked that Walter Scott caused the Civil War...
...Although it deals with more recent times, it feels more distant, more rhetorical...
...films like A Man for All Seasons may be too talky...
...Directed by Oliver Stone {Platoon and Wall Street), it moves with quick, sure strides to the 1960s-Ron hears John Kennedy's "fight any foe" inaugural speech...
...certainly he can be blamed for its movies, from The Birth of a Nation to Gone with the Windto TV's "North and South," with their Scott-like romanticizations of plantation chivalry and the defense of states' rights...
...They also commit the heresy of depicting just how murderous the Civil War actually was, and will free many from the pernicious claptrap in our folklore about it...
...midway, we lose track of three of the strongest characters near Kovic-his quiet, helpless father (Raymond J. Barry), his domineering mother (Caroline Cava), and a girlfriend (Kyra Sedgwick...
...The regiment also had to prove itself capable of soldiering...
...This film seems an opposite of Zwick's work to date...
...The film's vivid scenes of antiwar protests (including one made with Abbie Hoffman shortly before his death) will bring back for older viewers the chaos of those times and the sense of irrecoverable losses...
...They play ex-slaves who enlist in the 54th, eager to show their manhood and attain equality through soldiering...
...winds up (to his horror) killing babies near the DMZ...
...with his nonstop belligerence, bony face, and shaved head, he's Michael Jordan with menace, aching to fight anyone...
...Born is a forceful and important film, but an uneven, unsatisfying one...
...It is not based on his own combat experiences, but those of Kovic, now a paraplegic, author of the original play, co-author of the screenplay, and a founder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War...
...in interviews, he has claimed that he felt guilty about the war-mongering in Top Gun (1985), was moved by Platoon (1986), and wanted to warn his young admirers about militarism...
...Would that Glory sparked a third...
...But at its core is "sixties-something," that is, a concern with issues like racial justice, which Zwick experienced as a student in the 1960s and which his TV "yuppies" haven't entirely lost...
...Glory is directed by Ed Zwick, one of the creators of "thir-tysomething," a TV show fashionable both to watch and to malign...
...To do so, the 54th had to endure virulent racism in the Union army, and brave the wrath of the enemy if ever taken prisoner...
...Glory has the two finest black actors-perhaps the two finest actors-in American films today, Morgan Freeman (of Street Smart, Lean on Me, and the current Miss Daisy), and Denzel Washington (A Soldier's Story, Cry Freedom...
...Truth is so rare in life, and rarer still in movies, that when a work like Glory comes along-after you finish shaking-you want to cheer its makers for their art and courage...
...Stone knows how to evoke an era with bold brushstrokes...
...Authenticity is Glory's keynote...
...Washington juts his jaw in everyone's face...
...swallows the anticommunism of his Catholic, cheerleading mother...
...The real problem lies in the screenplay by Kevin Jarre, which is generally very well written...
...Of course, Zwick works in Hollywood, but he does have concerns that date from the time that tried, in effect, a second reconstruction...
...his final antiwar line is not the one she imagines...
...rarely have the late fifties and early sixties been so economically portrayed...
...here is a solid candidate for getting the shivers...
...Born on the Fourth of July covers more recent history- Vietnam...
...Kovic's mother tells him early on that she dreams of him making great speeches...
...Freeman is strong, silent, eventually a sergeant...
...Nothing in it is as stirring as a revival-type gospel session led by Freeman the night before the attack on Wagner, a scene powerful for its religious as well as military elements...
...Scenes in a field ward, then in a veterans' hospital will wrench any stomach with their depictions of battle wounds and their aftermath, particularly the dependence of disabled vets on nurses and machines for their most basic bodily functions and human dignity...
...Glory follows the 54th from its recruitment to the bloody 1863 siege of Fort Wagner in South Carolina...
...it's about our national racial tragedy, almost our national soul...
...But she does hit one nail on the head: if Glory has too few, Born has too many words...
...It starts strongly, with a suc-cession of pastoral and domestic images: kids playing guns in the Long Island woods in the 1950s, baseball games, and a 4th of July parade where young Ron Kovic (Tom Cruise) enviously eyes veterans from the World War II...
...If Platoon was his war, Born on the Fourth of July is Stone's peace, or at least war on the homefront...
Vol. 117 • February 1990 • No. 3
