We Were Soldiers *
Dir: Randall Wallace
With: Mel Gibson, Madeleine Stowe, Sam Elliott, Greg Kinnear, Chris Klein, Josh Daugherty, Barry Pepper, Keri Russell, Edwin Morrow, Mike White
139 mins, cert 15
www.weweresoldiers.com
You could have fooled me is all I can say in the case of many of the Hollywood stars, young and not so young, featured in this dramatisation of the Battle of Ia Drang of 1965, the American military's first decisive engagement in the Vietnam war. Mel Gibson appears in warrior mode, and as in Braveheart and The Patriot, his strong, handsome face and fiercely china-blue eyes are set off by a patina of martial grime.
Gibson plays Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore, the leader of the first battalion of the Seventh Cavalry, Custer's old unit, sent in by Washington bigwigs to engage a numerically superior enemy with little or nothing in the way of reconnaissance, but with a vital secret weapon - the new Air Mobile helicopter gunships, which could spirit fighting men across hostile terrain at great speeds, maintain supply lines and despatch goodly amounts of fire, friendly and unfriendly.
Since Apocalypse Now, no one can possibly see these helicopters without thinking of the deliriously brilliant images that Coppola devised with them, or savouring the image of Robert Duvall in his Custeresque cowboy hat. But this unimaginative, regressive movie stolidly requires us to forget about all that, to de-ironise these icons and abandon these perspectives in favour of a naive and saucer-eyed reverence.
Like Black Hawk Down, it makes much of the idea of "getting all our boys out" - an achievement tacitly offered in lieu of victory - and it's saturated with a post-September 11 flavour. This is partly because the most famous Ia Drang veteran happens to be the British-born platoon leader Rick Rescorla, who famously came to be a 62-year-old executive at the World Trade Centre, and who died masterminding an evacuation that saved thousands of lives. Rescorla is not mentioned in We Were Soldiers, perhaps because his Cornish background didn't fit this all-American tale and his WTC apotheosis came too late for the movie's production schedule to be revised.
Despite this, We Were Soldiers certainly resonates with an appropriately chastened yet belligerent mood. American troops were heavily outnumbered at Ia Drang, and this film gives the US army a very topical kind of macho victim status. Director and screenwriter Randall Wallace gives over the vast majority of his film to his battle sequences, prefaced by a browbeatingly stirring musical score. These scenes themselves are orchestrated competently, in the derivative post-Saving Private Ryan manner. But as in Pearl Harbor, for which Wallace wrote the screenplay, amidst all the whizz-bang there is an absence of genuine human emotion or vulnerability: none of the fear, horror and exhilaration of battle that another type of movie might have wanted to show.
That big, lovable lunk Chris Klein, as Lieutenant Jack Geoghegan, is too much of a smooth-cheeked teen lead to be the slightest bit credible as a leader of men. And perky, dapper Greg Kinnear - asking us to believe he is a tough, cigar-chewing major - is just ridiculous. He is supposed to be in the thick of one of the grisliest firefights in American military history, yet he looks like he has just sauntered out of the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Allegedly crazed by the spectacle of death, Greg pulls a sidearm on one of his brother officers, and looks like he's having a spat with the maître d' at Spago.
The soul of any war movie is tested by how it handles civilian scenes back home, and here the film is just grotesque. The army wives assemble like a twittering chorus of lobotomised helpmeets, a kind of cleaned-up version of the wives' coffee-mornings in GoodFellas - with Madeline Stowe as Gibson's adoring missus. Com pare these cardboard scenes with, say, the emotionally complex home front in The Deer Hunter. Subtleties of this sort are arguably the luxuries of peacetime, and Hollywood believes itself now to be at war. But even propaganda films don't have to be as dire as this.
Comédie de L'Innocence **
Dir: Raoul Ruiz
With: Isabelle Huppert, Jeanne Balibar, Charles Berling, Nils Hugon, Edith Scob, Denis Podalydès
95 mins, cert PG
A diverting, but frustrating and ultimately disappointing oddity from the prolific Raoul Ruiz. This is the story of a young boy, Camille, who on his ninth birthday announces to his mother Ariane (Isabelle Huppert) that he now wishes to go home to his real mother: and then shows the tape he has been making on a video-camera his uncle Serge (Charles Berling) gave him last year, and to everyone's astonishment, it seems to be the interior of a flat belonging to his "other" mother.
Camille takes Huppert to see this woman - Isabella, a violin teacher, played by Jeanne Balibar, whose elegant, feline presence was displayed to better effect earlier this year in Rivette's Va Savoir. The mystery is deepened when it is revealed that Isabelle lost her own child in a drowning accident. But how has she managed to inveigle Camille into her crazed, grief-inspired fantasy? And how has Camille possibly had the time to develop an acquaintance with this disturbed woman when his real family haven't let him out of their sight for more than 10 minutes at a time?
This is not a psychological thriller, exactly, neither is it precisely a ghost story. Ruiz describes it as a "movie about Don Juan's childhood" - a sort of seriocomic prehistory of male emotional philandering? Perhaps. But no genre excuses the movie's bizarre, somnolent atmosphere. No believable emotions are displayed at any point and Huppert herself retains her trademark sphinx-like expression, which was very effective in Merci Pour le Chocolat and The Piano Teacher, but is baffling here. There is even a scene in which she is advised by a lawyer to take action against this phoney mother: "You have got to react!" That's what Ruiz should have been telling her.
Hearts in Atlantis *
Dir: Scott Hicks
With: Anthony Hopkins, Anton Yelchin, Hope Davis, Mika Boorem, David Morse, Alan Tudyk, Tom Bower
101 mins, cert 12
www.heartsinatlantis.co.uk
For sheer burbling silliness and tiresome moonshine mysticism, this is hard to beat. From the pen of screenwriting legend William Goldman, working from a Stephen King novel, and directed by Scott "Shine" Hicks, it's got the sub-sub-Stand By Me premise of a middle-aged man, Bobby (David Morse), remembering an idyllic yet dangerous period of childhood when he roamed the countryside with his buddy Sully and the little girl he was secretly in love with.
Bobby befriends a wise yet charismatic old gentleman with telepathic powers who lives in the upstairs apartment: Sir Anthony Hopkins. Bobby and his friends are bullied by local toughs and his mom makes him go without so she can buy frocks to please her fancyman. But Hopkins gives him a dollar a week to read to him and tell him if there are any suspicious "low men" in the neighbourhood who might be after him.
The reality behind these sinister "low men" is outrageously lame; the whole thing is supremely forgettable, and Hopkins's acting seems to consist in going into catatonic trances long enough for a kettle to boil.
