CASUALTIES OF WAR
** (Worth seeing) Directed by Brian De Palma Written by David Rabe With Michael J. Fox, Sean Penn, Don Harvey, John C. Reilly, John Leguizamo, Thuy Thu Le, and Erik King.
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To be perfectly honest, for all my skepticism about De Palma, I even found his Hitchcock rip-offs somewhat interesting in spite of their many irritations. I liked the split screens in Sisters, the use of Bernard Herrmann’s score in Obsession (which guided the plot somewhat more gracefully than Paul Schrader’s overwrought script), the uses of Angie Dickinson and Nancy Allen in Dressed to Kill, the attention given to sound in Blow Out (which managed to crib plenty from Antonioni and Coppola as well as Hitchcock), the feeling for space in Body Double. But the ugliness of the director’s attitude toward both his characters and his audience, the sheer clamminess of his “touch,” always spoiled part of the fun, and I found the main defense of De Palma being offered by Pauline Kael and her legion of followers–which was essentially that movie trash was better than movie art because it socked you in the gut and made you feel down and dirty–pretty childish and unedifying. Considering De Palma’s pathetic reliance on other directors for most of his themes, plot twists, and formal ideas, it seemed singularly perverse to keep on implying, as the Kael position did, that if poor Alfred had only applied himself a little and dirtied up his act–goosed up his editing, accelerated and multiplied his camera movements so that they went beyond logical dramatic requirements, and poured on a few more tons of gore and sleaze–he might have achieved works of true genius like our golden boy Brian.
If De Palma’s shamelessness in reaching for any kind of excess to juice up his rusty and borrowed vehicles sometimes gave his work an undeniable lift–a sense that anything could and would happen, no matter how far it went over the top–it also had the grim consequence of eventually turning almost everything he touched into florid kitsch. I treasure Howard Hawks’s Scarface much too much to prefer De Palma’s remake, but at least he pumped it up with a contemporary vulgarity, drive, and energy that gave it, with the help of Al Pacino and screenwriter Oliver Stone, a certain identity and integrity of its own. But when he offers a cartoonish version of the Odessa-steps sequence from Eisenstein’s Potemkin at a crucial juncture in The Untouchables, the “hommage” is so grossly demeaning to its source (and that source’s context) that it reminds me of a record album encountered in my youth called Back Beat Symphony, which contrived to serve up Schubert and Brahms in rock-and-roll versions.
Is it really correct to claim, as Bob Straus did in the Sun-Times last week, that Casualties of War is “as anti-war as a contemporary American movie probably can get”? If that were true, it would be impossible to expect any contemporary American movie about Vietnam to be antiwar, and one of the effects that Casualties of War has had on me has been to make me sick of all the allegedly antiwar Vietnam films that have come along to date–from Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter to Platoon and Full Metal Jacket. (I’ve argued in the past that the last of these isn’t really about Vietnam at all, but if it’s read as part of an ongoing movie discourse about the war, as it generally is, then I’m afraid it’s no less tainted.) In fact, I think that Straus is wrong, and that sizable portions of the American public are less Neanderthal in their moral judgment of the Vietnam war than Reagan, Bush, and Hollywood take them to be; but as long as the media continue to ratify this insulting and cynical reading of the general populace, it’s difficult to foresee any substantial improvements in the public discourse that we get about Vietnam.
Although at least three of the members of the squad are treated as central-casting stereotypes in the usual De Palma manner–a hillbilly airhead (Reilly), a coward who sacrifices his scruples to risk making waves (Leguizamo), and a mean-spirited villain (Harvey)–De Palma, Rabe, Fox, and Penn make a concerted effort to invest Eriksson and the sergeant with a bit more moral complexity and ambiguity. (During certain key moments, the mise en scene contrives to set up conflicting focal points in the foreground and background, implicating the audience in the conflicts that result from this ambiguity.) But the positioning of the movie as a whole makes this effort viable only if one agrees to participate in the collective amnesia that makes such moral conceits possible. Presumably it’s still OK to bomb any country back to the Stone Age to “make it safe for democracy” as long as you show compassion for the local populace, don’t rape or murder any potential allies, and suffer sufficient moral pangs about your helplessness.
