REGRET TO INFORM A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 1999 Steve Rhodes RATING (0 TO ****): ** 1/2
When she was 24 years old, Barbara Sonneborn lost her husband, Jeff Gurvitz, who died in the Vietnam War. On the twentieth anniversary of his death, she decided to go to Vietnam to see where he was killed in a mortar attack.
REGRET TO INFORM is the moving, but frustrating, documentary that she made about her experience as well as those of various American and Vietnamese widows. The film, which received an Academy Award nomination last year for best documentary, has been opening slowly in theaters around the United States.
Handsomely filmed by Emiko Omori, Daniel Reeves and Nancy Schiesari, the images make the tragic story palpable. Organized into a series of interviews with the widows, the film intersperses archival footage of the war and pastoral scenes of Vietnam today.
As someone whose best neighborhood buddy was killed in the war, the movie brought back painful memories. Silly as it might seem, when a section of the Vietnam memorial was shown, I tried hard to catch a glimpse of some of the names of my friends who perished. Not to do so would have felt like a disservice to them.
Global conflicts, such as the two World Wars, are full of glory than lingers forever. Civil wars, like those in Vietnam or Korea in which the US chose to participate, have at best a fleeting glory. People quickly forget them. Movies such as REGRET TO INFORM keep these important memories alive.
The significant downside to REGRET TO INFORM is that it is essentially a propaganda piece since its views are completely one-sided. Sonneborn turns a gut-wrenchingly complex situation into a simplistically easy one. She points out that the people of Vietnam call it the American War, as if that were a major revelation.
If you know nothing about the war (many of the kids in our schools today know little), then this documentary would leave you with two strong impressions. First, the barbaric Americans invaded a helplessly agrarian society for no obvious purpose. Second, that many atrocities were committed, and all were done by American soldiers against innocent Vietnamese men, women and children civilians.
Although we hear again and again about all of the wrongs that the Americans committed, never do we hear anything about the Vietnam civil war, Communism vs. Democracy or the Vietnamese atrocities against the Americans. The American soldiers who were beaten and killed in captivity deserve some recognition.
Documentarians can produce good movies even if they are slanted. The people who died in the war deserve to be remembered. REGRET TO INFORM does this, for which it should be commended.
REGRET TO INFORM runs just 1:12. It is not rated but would be PG-13 for some war footage and would be fine for kids around 12 and up.
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com
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