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Patriotism, not the scoundrel's last refuge but the killer's first doctrine, Oliver Stone prescribes a full deprogramming. "Semper Fi, motherfucker!" Yankee Doodle pyrotechnics and Little League homeruns for the Long Island boy playing soldier in the woods, magnified Americana as sinister as Lynch's. The bogus Eden must be protected and Ron Kovic (Tom Cruise) volunteers, shaped by wrestling coaches and recruiting ramrods and a mother (Caroline Kava) who recoils from the word "penis." The moony prom gives way to the Martian landscape of Vietnam, "a very confusing day" sees the Marine sergeant accidentally slaughter villagers and shoot down one of his own men, a severed spine caps the raid on gung-ho innocence. "You served and you lost. You got to live with it." The mutilated body politic, a bullhorn of disenchantment. Girone della merda, as Pasolini would say, a septic purgatory at the VA hospital. (The reverie of miraculous mobility yields to vomit on the floor.) "Love it or leave it" is the paraplegic's mantra to antiwar protesters, refusing to admit a betrayal clear even to the junk-food entrepreneur: "The government sold us a bill of goods." Ashen flags and ballistic firecrackers, trauma on parade. Illumination is a dolorous process, Stone chases it down Mexico way for an operatic wallow that aims to out-Peckinpah Peckinpah. (Willem Dafoe turns up like the Platoon angel gone to seed.) Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun is the acknowledged mainstay, the confession to the dead comrade's family points up Lubitsch's Broken Lullaby. The lost warrior finds himself in activism, "whole again" as a celebrity guest at the Democratic National Convention, one battlefield replaces another just as one myth replaces another. "This is your Memorial Day on wheels." Forrest Gump is the antimatter counterpart. Cinematography by Robert Richardson. With Kyra Sedgwick, Raymond J. Barry, Frank Whaley, Jerry Levine, Cordelia Gonzalez, Ed Lauter, John Getz, Michael Wincott, Stephen Baldwin, Bob Gunton, Holly Marie Combs, Lili Taylor, Tom Sizemore, and Tom Berenger.
--- Fernando F. Croce |