HEAVEN AND EARTH
A film review by Richard Montanari
Copyright 1994 Richard Montanari
Caution: Falling Stone
It is a well known fact that, when testosterone seeps into the brain, a host of aberrant behaviors are possible. This condition seems to be most virulent in the middle-aged macho radical who, when faced with the grown-up notion that he really *isn't* going to change the world, begin to mutate into a sort of heavily-armed Amway salesman from Berkeley who won't get off your porch.
For Oliver Stone, who has always fancied himself the keeper of conspiracies in America, the Vietnam war has obviously been a very difficult thing to expiate. On the other hand, the Vietnam war has also been very, very good to Oliver Stone.
In his films, Stone has shown us the war through the eyes of a naive young infantryman (PLATOON, 1986), an embittered, disabled veteran (BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1989), and now, with HEAVEN AND EARTH, he tells us the same story once again, this time through the eyes of a Vietnamese woman.
Based on the books WHEN HEAVEN AND EARTH CHANGED PLACES and CHILD OF WAR, WOMAN OF PEACE by Le Ly Hayslip, HEAVEN AND EARTH chronicles the war for Le Ly (Hiep Thi Le) a farm girl from a primeval village near Da Nang.
The story opens in 1953 with Le Ly's mother, played by Joan Chen, teaching her daughter the ancient ways of the rice paddy. But soon, colonialism arrives in the guise of *the French*.
Sure, the Vietnamese people had been enslaved and butchered by a number of masters--including the Chinese--but, as Stone is quick to remind us, this, like the Americans to come, is occidental occupation, which makes it more insidious somehow.
Under French occupation, we are witness to numerous scenes of Le Ly's degradation. She is raped by a local Viet Cong leader and subjected to electroshock therapy at the hands of the South Vietnamese army.
Le Ly and her mother then head to Saigon, where they find employ as maids to a local businessman and his socialite wife. But the businessman seduces and impregnates Le Ly, and she is banished.
A few years later Le Ly meets army lifer Steve Butler (Tommy Lee Jones). Although it is clear to us early on that the war has unhinged Butler, Le Ly takes pity on him, a feeling that eventually turns to love. After the war, they try to lead a normal life in San Diego but, as Le Ly discovers, the jungle still rages within them both, and the war, at least in their hearts and minds, is far from over.
Oliver Stone's mandatory, fourth-quarter "duality of nature" speech is, of course, intact here, this time covering heaven and earth, good and evil, night and day, hot and cold, young and old, man and wife, Vietnam and America--it's almost longer than Costner's interminable wail at the end of JFK.
But is not only subject matter that has stagnated Stone's work. His metaphorical resources have run so dry that, for instance, every time life confronts Le Ly in HEAVEN AND EARTH, Stone supports the moment with a quick stare into space and some flashbacks to either Buddha, Mom and Dad, an ox, a flame thrower or a straw hat blowing across a rice paddy. In fact, when Le Ly visits an American grocery store for the first time, you half-expect her to call upon Lord Buddha to shed spiritual light on her dilemma: Frozen or Canned? Batter-dipped or Lightly Breaded? Paper or Plastic?
As the seething Butler, Tommy Lee Jones brings an indefinable rage to the under-written role, a character-type that was far better served in ROLLING THUNDER (1977). Joan Chen is superb as Le Ly's aging mother, as is Hiep Thi Le as the fragile, resourceful Le Ly.
But for those of us who remember him as the man who wrote MIDNIGHT EXPRESS and YEAR OF THE DRAGON, Oliver Stone is rapidly becoming that cigar-smoking, boozy uncle who always has to be carried out of the party. You want to like him, he occasionally gets off a good one, but the act, like the smoke, is getting awfully stale.
HEAVEN AND EARTH: C- c. 1994 Richard Montanari CIS: 73112,3705 InterNet: am074@cleveland.freenet.edu
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