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What 'Platoon' does and undoesIt’s taken 15 years for the Vietnam agony to get off of our collective backs sufficiently for the first honest and successful combat film of that watershed war in our history to seize the public’s imagination. Oliver Stone’s Platoon (at the Lensic) is numero uno on the charts, a status soReview By Randolph Manregularly achieved only by milquetoast drivel, that you have to stop for a minute to ponder such a phenomenon.It means that a great cross*section of the American public is finally coming to terms with an episode inour recent history that came closer than anything since the Civil War to ripping apart the national fabric. The days of not wanting to hear about it, not wanting to think about it, are over.Maybe it was the long-delayed Vietnam Memorial or maybe the spectre of Nicaragua looming in our future, but Vietnam is becoming a Big Subject again. Non-fiction books, like Mark Baker’s oral history Nam, are heavy sellers. Time-Life’s 23-volume The Vietnam Experience is being widely sold over local television, with more than a half-million copies of Volume One in subscribers’ hands already.The movies always have been slowto face reality. Nine years ago The Deer Hunter raked in the Oscars while realistic studies of combat, like The Boys in Company C and Go Tell the Spartans released the same year, died on the box-office vine. Perhaps it was only natural that a war as twisted in the public eye would get its movies backwards, too, and audiences would accept the new Best Years of Our Lives before they’d accept the new Guadalcanal Diary.So, Pla toon is not the first Vietnam combat film and not even the first honest one, but it is the first one made by a Vietnam vet and the first one anybody’s wanted to see besides the war movie freaks and the habitues of long-gone big city grind houses.That, of course, doesn’t make it a masterpiece. Platoon tries a little too hard to be one, to be a poetic commentary on men at war, to do for Vietnam what Lewis Milestone’s A Walk in the Sun (1945) did for World War II. And like the earlier film, its narrative gimmicks seem half-baked, even sophomoric. Stone seems to be trying to be the Melville for his generation when he’s actually succeeding intermittently at being its Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage is constantly kept in mind).Which isn’t at all bad. Platoon is definitely one of the classic combat pictures, a Dolby-stereo evocation of the paranoid terrors of jungle fighting, of the mud, the rain, the insects, the blood, disembodied voices on theradio squawking for help and men screaming in the sudden, fragmentary knowledge that they are no longer intact. It shows more than any previous film the appalling irrelevance of high-tech weaponry to guerrilla war.And it’s so much better for being small. We can be thankful that Hollywood refused to touch it for ten years after Stone’s script was finished and that a tinv British outfit, Hemdale, produced it on a paltry $6-million budget. It’s a picture with too few antecedents to warrant calling them a tradition, the once-in-a-while offbeat gems like Robert Aldrich’s Attack! (1956) and Sam Fuller’s lean, hard and nasty little two-bit epics like The Steel Helmet and Fixed Bayonets.We can also be thankful that Stone refrains from loading his narrative with anguished speechifying about the mass deceit practiced both in Washington and Saigon. He’s canny enough to know that his audience is going to do all that for him, to curse fiie LBJs, the Westmorelands, the Nixons and the rest of the mendacious lot.There were no recruiting stands in the Lensic lobby.Randolph Man is a former Programming Consultant to the Denver International Film Festival and has taught, talked, distributed and lived film for 20 years.
Newspaper Details
Santa Fe New Mexican
Santa Fe, New Mexico, US
Fri, Feb 13, 1987
Page 31
Full Page
Clipped by
Jon C.
NJ, USA 15 Jan 2020
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