Born on the Fourth of July (1989)
Review/Film; How an All-American Boy Went to War and Lost His Faith
By VINCENT CANBY
Published: December 20, 1989
LEAD: As a teen-ager in Massapequa, L.I., in the 1960's, Ron Kovic believed in all of the right things, including God, country and the domino theory. He was Jack Armstrong, the all-American boy, good-looking, shy around girls and a surreptitious reader of Playboy. He was the archetypal son in a large archetypal lower-middle-class Roman
As a teen-ager in Massapequa, L.I., in the 1960's, Ron Kovic believed in all of the right things, including God, country and the domino theory. He was Jack Armstrong, the all-American boy, good-looking, shy around girls and a surreptitious reader of Playboy. He was the archetypal son in a large archetypal lower-middle-class Roman Catholic family.
When he competed as a member of the high school wrestling team, he wanted to win, and when he lost a match, he wept. Winning was the way he measured his belief in himself. He didn't question the values that shaped his optimism.
On graduating from high school, he enlisted in the Marine Corps to fight in Vietnam. ''Communists are moving in everywhere,'' he told his somewhat more skeptical classmates. Home and hearth were endangered. Ron Kovic, who really was born on the Fourth of July, was ready when his country called.
In 1968, during his second tour of duty in Vietnam, a bullet tore through his spinal column. He returned home a paraplegic, paralyzed from the waist down, emotionally as well as physically shattered. That was the beginning of a long, painful spiritual rehabilitation that coincided with his political radicalization.
By the time the war ended, Ron Kovic had become one of the most restless and implacable spokesmen for Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Childhood was forever gone.
Taking ''Born on the Fourth of July,'' Mr. Kovic's fine spare memoir about this coming of age, published in 1976, Oliver Stone has made what is, in effect, a bitter, seething postscript to his Oscar-winning ''Platoon.''
It is a film of enormous visceral power with, in the central role, a performance by Tom Cruise that defines everything that is best about the movie. He is both particular and emblematic. He is innocent and clean-cut at the start; at the end, angry and exhausted, sporting a proud mustache and a headband around his forehead and hippie-length hair.
Though ideally handsome, Mr. Cruise looks absolutely right, which is not to underrate the performance itself. The two things cannot be easily separated. Watching the evolution of his Ron Kovic, as he comes to terms with a reality for which he was completely unprepared, is both harrowing and inspiring.
Written by Mr. Stone and Mr. Kovic, the screenplay is panoramic, sometimes too panoramic for its own good. It covers Ron's childhood, his teen-age years, his enlistment, the tour of duty in Vietnam and his long recuperation in a Bronx veterans' hospital, an institution that makes Bedlam look like summer camp.
No other Vietnam movie has so mercilessly evoked the casual, careless horrors of the paraplegic's therapy, or what it means to depend on catheters for urination, or the knowledge that sexual identity is henceforth virtually theoretical.
One of the film's problems is that it becomes increasingly generalized as it attempts to dramatize Mr. Kovic's transformation from a wide-eyed Yankee Doodle boy to an antiwar activist.
The film is stunning when it is most specific. There is the nighttime mission when Ron's outfit slaughters a group of Vietnamese peasants in the belief that a Vietcong patrol has been ambushed.
In the confusion of a fire fight, Ron shoots one of his own corporals through the neck. When he tries to confess to murder, he is given absolution by an officer who tells him that he is probably mistaken and that, anyway, these things happen.
Equally agonizing are the posthospital sequences when Ron returns to his well-meaning but bewildered family in Massapequa, where he is presented as the grand marshal of the annual Fourth of July parade. People are always trying to help. ''I'm O.K.,'' he says, or ''I'm all right'' or ''O.K. O.K.'' But there is no understanding.
There is a fine old family row when Ron comes home one night from the local bar, drunk as has become his habit. In a fury, he pulls out the catheter. His mother calls him a drunk. His father tries to get him into his room. Ron cries out about his inoperative penis. His mother screams, ''I will not have you use the word penis in this house.''
The film turns less persuasive as Ron acquires his new political consciousness, possibly because, given everything that has gone before, the transformation is so obligatory to the drama. Mr. Stone's penchant for busy, jittery camera movements and cutting also do not help. Though they reflect Ron's earlier state of mind, they start to obscure the character of the man they mean to reveal.
Every member of the large cast is exemplary. It includes Raymond J. Barry and Caroline Kava as Ron's parents; Kyra Sedgwick as his high school girlfriend; Frank Whaley, who is especially good as a fellow vet, one of the few people with whom Ron can communicate when he comes home, and Cordelia Gonzalez as the Mexican whore who tries to persuade Ron that he's still a man.
The two stars of ''Platoon'' appear in cameo roles: Tom Berenger, as the marine who recruits Ron with his rousing pep talk at Ron's high school, and Willem Dafoe, as a fellow paraplegic vet Ron meets during a brief interlude in Mexico. An aging Abbie Hoffman, an icon of the Vietnam years, makes a sad, curious appearance, more or less playing himself during an antiwar demonstration set in the 1960's. (Hoffman committed suicide in April at the age of 52.) ''Born on the Fourth of July'' is a far more complicated movie than ''Platoon.'' It's the most ambitious nondocumentary film yet made about the entire Vietnam experience. More effectively than Hal Ashby's ''Coming Home'' and even Michael Cimino's ''Deer Hunter,'' it connects the war of arms abroad with the war of conscience at home.
As much as anything else, Ron Kovic's story is about the vanishing of one man's American frontier. AND THEN REBORN BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, directed by Oliver Stone; screenplay by Mr. Stone and Ron Kovic, based on Mr. Kovic's book; director of photography, Robert Richardson; edited by David Brenner; music by John Williams; production designer, Bruno Rubeo; produced by A. Kitman Ho and Mr. Stone; released by Universal Pictures. At Ziegfeld, 141 West 54th Street. Running time: 145 minutes. This film is rated R. Ron Kovic . . . Tom Cruise Donna . . . Kyra Sedgwick Mr. Kovic . . . Raymond J. Barry Mrs. Kovic . . . Caroline Kava Steve Boyer . . . Jerry Levine Timmy . . . Frank Whaley Charlie . . . Willem Dafoe Tommy Kovic . . . Josh Evans Jimmy Kovic . . . Jamie Talisman
*Published in New York Times
(Fresh)
Review/Film; How an All-American Boy Went to War and Lost His Faith
By VINCENT CANBY
Published: December 20, 1989
LEAD: As a teen-ager in Massapequa, L.I., in the 1960's, Ron Kovic believed in all of the right things, including God, country and the domino theory. He was Jack Armstrong, the all-American boy, good-looking, shy around girls and a surreptitious reader of Playboy. He was the archetypal son in a large archetypal lower-middle-class Roman
As a teen-ager in Massapequa, L.I., in the 1960's, Ron Kovic believed in all of the right things, including God, country and the domino theory. He was Jack Armstrong, the all-American boy, good-looking, shy around girls and a surreptitious reader of Playboy. He was the archetypal son in a large archetypal lower-middle-class Roman Catholic family.
When he competed as a member of the high school wrestling team, he wanted to win, and when he lost a match, he wept. Winning was the way he measured his belief in himself. He didn't question the values that shaped his optimism.
On graduating from high school, he enlisted in the Marine Corps to fight in Vietnam. ''Communists are moving in everywhere,'' he told his somewhat more skeptical classmates. Home and hearth were endangered. Ron Kovic, who really was born on the Fourth of July, was ready when his country called.
In 1968, during his second tour of duty in Vietnam, a bullet tore through his spinal column. He returned home a paraplegic, paralyzed from the waist down, emotionally as well as physically shattered. That was the beginning of a long, painful spiritual rehabilitation that coincided with his political radicalization.
By the time the war ended, Ron Kovic had become one of the most restless and implacable spokesmen for Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Childhood was forever gone.
Taking ''Born on the Fourth of July,'' Mr. Kovic's fine spare memoir about this coming of age, published in 1976, Oliver Stone has made what is, in effect, a bitter, seething postscript to his Oscar-winning ''Platoon.''
It is a film of enormous visceral power with, in the central role, a performance by Tom Cruise that defines everything that is best about the movie. He is both particular and emblematic. He is innocent and clean-cut at the start; at the end, angry and exhausted, sporting a proud mustache and a headband around his forehead and hippie-length hair.
Though ideally handsome, Mr. Cruise looks absolutely right, which is not to underrate the performance itself. The two things cannot be easily separated. Watching the evolution of his Ron Kovic, as he comes to terms with a reality for which he was completely unprepared, is both harrowing and inspiring.
Written by Mr. Stone and Mr. Kovic, the screenplay is panoramic, sometimes too panoramic for its own good. It covers Ron's childhood, his teen-age years, his enlistment, the tour of duty in Vietnam and his long recuperation in a Bronx veterans' hospital, an institution that makes Bedlam look like summer camp.
No other Vietnam movie has so mercilessly evoked the casual, careless horrors of the paraplegic's therapy, or what it means to depend on catheters for urination, or the knowledge that sexual identity is henceforth virtually theoretical.
One of the film's problems is that it becomes increasingly generalized as it attempts to dramatize Mr. Kovic's transformation from a wide-eyed Yankee Doodle boy to an antiwar activist.
The film is stunning when it is most specific. There is the nighttime mission when Ron's outfit slaughters a group of Vietnamese peasants in the belief that a Vietcong patrol has been ambushed.
In the confusion of a fire fight, Ron shoots one of his own corporals through the neck. When he tries to confess to murder, he is given absolution by an officer who tells him that he is probably mistaken and that, anyway, these things happen.
Equally agonizing are the posthospital sequences when Ron returns to his well-meaning but bewildered family in Massapequa, where he is presented as the grand marshal of the annual Fourth of July parade. People are always trying to help. ''I'm O.K.,'' he says, or ''I'm all right'' or ''O.K. O.K.'' But there is no understanding.
There is a fine old family row when Ron comes home one night from the local bar, drunk as has become his habit. In a fury, he pulls out the catheter. His mother calls him a drunk. His father tries to get him into his room. Ron cries out about his inoperative penis. His mother screams, ''I will not have you use the word penis in this house.''
The film turns less persuasive as Ron acquires his new political consciousness, possibly because, given everything that has gone before, the transformation is so obligatory to the drama. Mr. Stone's penchant for busy, jittery camera movements and cutting also do not help. Though they reflect Ron's earlier state of mind, they start to obscure the character of the man they mean to reveal.
Every member of the large cast is exemplary. It includes Raymond J. Barry and Caroline Kava as Ron's parents; Kyra Sedgwick as his high school girlfriend; Frank Whaley, who is especially good as a fellow vet, one of the few people with whom Ron can communicate when he comes home, and Cordelia Gonzalez as the Mexican whore who tries to persuade Ron that he's still a man.
The two stars of ''Platoon'' appear in cameo roles: Tom Berenger, as the marine who recruits Ron with his rousing pep talk at Ron's high school, and Willem Dafoe, as a fellow paraplegic vet Ron meets during a brief interlude in Mexico. An aging Abbie Hoffman, an icon of the Vietnam years, makes a sad, curious appearance, more or less playing himself during an antiwar demonstration set in the 1960's. (Hoffman committed suicide in April at the age of 52.) ''Born on the Fourth of July'' is a far more complicated movie than ''Platoon.'' It's the most ambitious nondocumentary film yet made about the entire Vietnam experience. More effectively than Hal Ashby's ''Coming Home'' and even Michael Cimino's ''Deer Hunter,'' it connects the war of arms abroad with the war of conscience at home.
As much as anything else, Ron Kovic's story is about the vanishing of one man's American frontier. AND THEN REBORN BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, directed by Oliver Stone; screenplay by Mr. Stone and Ron Kovic, based on Mr. Kovic's book; director of photography, Robert Richardson; edited by David Brenner; music by John Williams; production designer, Bruno Rubeo; produced by A. Kitman Ho and Mr. Stone; released by Universal Pictures. At Ziegfeld, 141 West 54th Street. Running time: 145 minutes. This film is rated R. Ron Kovic . . . Tom Cruise Donna . . . Kyra Sedgwick Mr. Kovic . . . Raymond J. Barry Mrs. Kovic . . . Caroline Kava Steve Boyer . . . Jerry Levine Timmy . . . Frank Whaley Charlie . . . Willem Dafoe Tommy Kovic . . . Josh Evans Jimmy Kovic . . . Jamie Talisman
*Published in New York Times
(Fresh)
Born on the Fourth of July
By Hal Hinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
January 05, 1990
Oliver Stone's "Born on the Fourth of July" unfurls itself with an ambitious flourish, like a stirring, patriotic anthem. It's his Main Street symphony, and in every frame, you feel his passion to make a grandiose social statement, to unload the movie equivalent of the Great American Novel and to define our age. In every frame you feel him emptying out his heart and soul.
This is an impassioned movie, made with conviction and evangelical verve. It's also hysterical and overbearing and alienating. Using Ron Kovic's autobiographical account of his lower-middle-class, small-town American upbringing, Stone stretches an epic canvas and splatters onto it all his beliefs about Vietnam, America, family, patriotism, and just about everything that's happened here in the last quarter-century.
This is not new territory for Stone. The film could almost be called "Platoon, Part Two"; it establishes the social and political context that led to Vietnam, plus its thundering aftershocks.
He begins Kovic's saga before Kovic enlists in the Marines for a tour in Vietnam that ultimately leaves him paralyzed from the chest down and leads him to overturn his cradle-born beliefs in God and country. It's easy to see why Stone chose Kovic's story to tell -- it isn't simply about the war; it's about the disenchantment over the loss of the American dream. It's about how Kovic -- who's played with diligence here by Tom Cruise and who stands in for millions of others like him -- is betrayed by the Fourth of July parades he's watched as a boy, by the John Wayne movies and the Yankee Doodle hoopla. About how everything in the culture, from playing war games in the woods as a boy to high school wrestling, draws this American Everyman to fight in Southeast Asia and lose all that matters to him -- his body, his values, his family, his country.
Kovic's book -- which he and Stone adapted for the screen -- tells of younger days wall-to-wall with dreams of glory and heroism. His father -- who's played by Raymond J. Barry and comes off as more of a weakling than in the book -- works at the A&P; The son wants more, and in Cruise's portrayal, his determination to succeed makes him seem grim and slightly haunted. Cruise is effective early as a square-shouldered, intensely disciplined boy dominated by his sternly devout mother (Caroline Kava).
These opening scenes -- which are set in Kovic's hometown of Massapequa, N.Y. -- are loaded with farm-fresh normalcy. But the camera-flexing, emphatic style that Stone uses gives them a kind of spooky burn. Stone, of course, can't help signaling that this all-American existence is going to turn into a horror show. The techniques he employs, in fact, are those of horror movies. When the scene shifts to Vietnam and Kovic and his unit mistakenly fire on a village of women and children, Stone and his cinematographer Robert Richardson give the carnage a maddened frenzy. He makes sure the screaming baby sprawled next to its dead mother is burned into our minds and locks us inside the young soldier's confused thought processes as, struggling with the blinding sun and the chaos of moving bodies, he kills one of his own men.
This is the film's pivotal moment, and it's shot with a searing dynamism. In it, all the moral underpinnings of Kovic's life are destroyed. Later, when a bullet severs nerves, leaving him without feeling in his lower body and unable to walk, the point is underscored. In body and mind, he has been ravaged.
Dramatically, the long following section, in which Kovic is forced through the hell of recovery in pigsty conditions in an understaffed veterans hospital, doesn't contribute anything essential, but in Stone's view that is probably the reason the picture was made. He didn't include the treatment of veterans in "Platoon," and he presents Kovic's ordeal as a kind of septic immersion -- a sordid rite of passage.
Here Stone is more an advocate for social justice than an artist. The scenes in Mexico -- where Kovic escapes after being kicked out of his parent's house and finds acceptance among a clot of disaffected vets led by a Manson-like figure played by Willem Dafoe -- are, in their own fevered, hallucinatory terms, the film's best.
Afterward, the movie shifts, first to Kovic's purifying confession of his sins to the parents of the boy he killed, and then to his transformation into an anti-war activist. This metamorphosis culminates in his speech before the 1980 Democratic National Convention, where his mother's dream is realized and the film comes full circle. It's hard to imagine, though, that audiences will feel similarly transformed. "Born on the Fourth of July" is nettlesome work. Stone has gifts as a filmmaker, but subtlety is not one of them. In essence, he's a propagandist, and, as it turns out, the least effective representative for his point of view. Stone wants desperately to effect a radical transformation in his audience. But it's this panicky drive to convert us to his way of thinking that undermines Stone's message.
It's not so much that what he puts on screen is negligible. The perceptions are valid, but they're not particularly original, and his personal investment in his issues and his vivid, hyperbolic style camouflage just how commonplace his ideas are. His major failing, though, is that he's not interested in any emotional state that doesn't include fireworks and strobe effects. Cruise's work in front of the camera is as ardent as his director's behind it. But Stone doesn't give his actors much room to work. He's too busy filling in all the details himself.
There's another problem: Because there have now been so many films about Vietnam, because we've seen so many innocent villagers gunned down, so many accidental deaths, so much tragedy and pain, unless a radically different perspective is presented -- as in De Palma's "Casualties of War" -- a numbing sense of familiarity sets in. If we're going to have to endure these tortures again, there had better be an urgent and essential need for it. In "Born on the Fourth of July," the urgency is there, but ultimately, urgency alone is not good enough.
*Published in Washington Post
(Rotten)
By Hal Hinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
January 05, 1990
Oliver Stone's "Born on the Fourth of July" unfurls itself with an ambitious flourish, like a stirring, patriotic anthem. It's his Main Street symphony, and in every frame, you feel his passion to make a grandiose social statement, to unload the movie equivalent of the Great American Novel and to define our age. In every frame you feel him emptying out his heart and soul.
This is an impassioned movie, made with conviction and evangelical verve. It's also hysterical and overbearing and alienating. Using Ron Kovic's autobiographical account of his lower-middle-class, small-town American upbringing, Stone stretches an epic canvas and splatters onto it all his beliefs about Vietnam, America, family, patriotism, and just about everything that's happened here in the last quarter-century.
This is not new territory for Stone. The film could almost be called "Platoon, Part Two"; it establishes the social and political context that led to Vietnam, plus its thundering aftershocks.
He begins Kovic's saga before Kovic enlists in the Marines for a tour in Vietnam that ultimately leaves him paralyzed from the chest down and leads him to overturn his cradle-born beliefs in God and country. It's easy to see why Stone chose Kovic's story to tell -- it isn't simply about the war; it's about the disenchantment over the loss of the American dream. It's about how Kovic -- who's played with diligence here by Tom Cruise and who stands in for millions of others like him -- is betrayed by the Fourth of July parades he's watched as a boy, by the John Wayne movies and the Yankee Doodle hoopla. About how everything in the culture, from playing war games in the woods as a boy to high school wrestling, draws this American Everyman to fight in Southeast Asia and lose all that matters to him -- his body, his values, his family, his country.
Kovic's book -- which he and Stone adapted for the screen -- tells of younger days wall-to-wall with dreams of glory and heroism. His father -- who's played by Raymond J. Barry and comes off as more of a weakling than in the book -- works at the A&P; The son wants more, and in Cruise's portrayal, his determination to succeed makes him seem grim and slightly haunted. Cruise is effective early as a square-shouldered, intensely disciplined boy dominated by his sternly devout mother (Caroline Kava).
These opening scenes -- which are set in Kovic's hometown of Massapequa, N.Y. -- are loaded with farm-fresh normalcy. But the camera-flexing, emphatic style that Stone uses gives them a kind of spooky burn. Stone, of course, can't help signaling that this all-American existence is going to turn into a horror show. The techniques he employs, in fact, are those of horror movies. When the scene shifts to Vietnam and Kovic and his unit mistakenly fire on a village of women and children, Stone and his cinematographer Robert Richardson give the carnage a maddened frenzy. He makes sure the screaming baby sprawled next to its dead mother is burned into our minds and locks us inside the young soldier's confused thought processes as, struggling with the blinding sun and the chaos of moving bodies, he kills one of his own men.
This is the film's pivotal moment, and it's shot with a searing dynamism. In it, all the moral underpinnings of Kovic's life are destroyed. Later, when a bullet severs nerves, leaving him without feeling in his lower body and unable to walk, the point is underscored. In body and mind, he has been ravaged.
Dramatically, the long following section, in which Kovic is forced through the hell of recovery in pigsty conditions in an understaffed veterans hospital, doesn't contribute anything essential, but in Stone's view that is probably the reason the picture was made. He didn't include the treatment of veterans in "Platoon," and he presents Kovic's ordeal as a kind of septic immersion -- a sordid rite of passage.
Here Stone is more an advocate for social justice than an artist. The scenes in Mexico -- where Kovic escapes after being kicked out of his parent's house and finds acceptance among a clot of disaffected vets led by a Manson-like figure played by Willem Dafoe -- are, in their own fevered, hallucinatory terms, the film's best.
Afterward, the movie shifts, first to Kovic's purifying confession of his sins to the parents of the boy he killed, and then to his transformation into an anti-war activist. This metamorphosis culminates in his speech before the 1980 Democratic National Convention, where his mother's dream is realized and the film comes full circle. It's hard to imagine, though, that audiences will feel similarly transformed. "Born on the Fourth of July" is nettlesome work. Stone has gifts as a filmmaker, but subtlety is not one of them. In essence, he's a propagandist, and, as it turns out, the least effective representative for his point of view. Stone wants desperately to effect a radical transformation in his audience. But it's this panicky drive to convert us to his way of thinking that undermines Stone's message.
It's not so much that what he puts on screen is negligible. The perceptions are valid, but they're not particularly original, and his personal investment in his issues and his vivid, hyperbolic style camouflage just how commonplace his ideas are. His major failing, though, is that he's not interested in any emotional state that doesn't include fireworks and strobe effects. Cruise's work in front of the camera is as ardent as his director's behind it. But Stone doesn't give his actors much room to work. He's too busy filling in all the details himself.
There's another problem: Because there have now been so many films about Vietnam, because we've seen so many innocent villagers gunned down, so many accidental deaths, so much tragedy and pain, unless a radically different perspective is presented -- as in De Palma's "Casualties of War" -- a numbing sense of familiarity sets in. If we're going to have to endure these tortures again, there had better be an urgent and essential need for it. In "Born on the Fourth of July," the urgency is there, but ultimately, urgency alone is not good enough.
*Published in Washington Post
(Rotten)