|
|
| Tookey's Review |
|
| Pro Reviews |
|
| Mixed Reviews |
|
| Anti Reviews |
|
| Cast |
|
| |
 |
| |
| Released: |
1989 |
| |
|
| Genre: |
WAR
DRAMA
RITES-OF-PASSAGE
OVERRATED
BIOPIC
|
| |
|
| Origin: |
US |
| |
|
| Colour: |
C |
| |
|
| Length: |
144 |
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
A young, gung-ho soldier, Ron Kovic (Tom Cruise) has his spine shattered in Viet Nam, and his faith in the war shattered when he returns home to a country which regards him and the war as embarrassments.
|
Reviewed by Chris Tookey
|
|
|
| Widely acclaimed on its release as the "definitive" movie about Vietnam, Born on the Fourth of July is a serious but very flawed attempt to come to terms with the Vietnam war. It is very overlong, and much of it is over-familiar. We've seen the torching of defenceless villages and the shooting of Americans by Americans, in Casualties of War and Platoon; veterans adjusting to life in a wheelchair in Coming Home and The Deer Hunter; and the thankless return to America in First Blood, Welcome Home and In Country... When all this is paraded before us yet again, it's hard not to feel Viet numb. |
| The two climaxes of the film are parochial, self-pitying and complacent. The first - Kovic's greatest moment of defiance - comes when he attends the 1972 Republican National Convention and rages against Nixon, Agnew and the rest. "They have killed a whole generation of young Americans!" he cries, momentarily forgetting perhaps that only 50,000 Americans died, while Vietnamese casualties ran into millions. |
| The final, supposedly uplifting set-piece is our hero's arrival as a guest speaker at the 1976 Democrat Convention. Surrounded by cheering activists and attentive journalists, Kovic looks happy and relaxed for the first time, and concludes: "Maybe we're home". The implication is clear: Kovic's physical injuries may remain, but his mental wounds - and the country's - are being cleansed by the democratic process and media publicity, of which this movie is a part. Such cosy rhetoric may be comforting, not least for American Democrats; but, unfortunately, it was Democrat Presidents Kennedy and Johnson who instigated the Vietnam war, and a Republican (Nixon) who ended it. |
| Although the American public was lied to by governments of both parties, these were leaders freely elected under a democratic system; and the truth about the war was available from early on, if the American people and media had cared to examine it. Stone conspicuously avoids a far less palatable truth about Vietnam: that the American people itself was responsible for sending so many young Americans (a disproportionate number of whom were black), and innumerable Vietnamese, to a futile death. |
|
|
|
|
, Kyra Sedgwick, Willem Dafoe
