THE WAR
A film review by John Walker
Copyright 1995 John Walker
In brief: In a bizarre way, I like THE WAR a lot--but for something other folks don't seem to have noticed. I think that's because there are two different movies here. As *talk*, THE WAR is an anti-war message piece with supporting subplots; its message is, "War makes us crazy."
But the heart of the film is its action. And the message of the
most of the *action* is, "You've got to learn what's worth
fighting for."
Most people seem to have noticed only the talk. Which is strange--doesn't the *action* count? It's as if even the film makers--director Jon Avnet and screenwriter Kathy McWorter, in particular--were unaware of the underlying message.
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It's 1970 in dirt-poor Juliette, Mississippi. The center of THE WAR is Stu Simmons (Elijah Wood). But he is crowded around with family members whose stories are major subplots, all interlocked. The most important is his father Stephen (Kevin Costner). Stephen is a Viet Nam veteran who couldn't hold a job after returning. He's back with the family again after being hospitalized for recurring nightmares. One strand in THE WAR is Stephen's interaction with his children and his warning against the dangers of violence--that in war, we go crazy, we do things we'll be ashamed of.
While Stephen was in the Nam, the family lost their house to termites and County condemnation. Now they live in a tiny, sort of squalid little cottage, not much better than a shack, with other similar houses crammed together cheek-by-jowl. Stu's mother Lois (Mare Winningham) holds the family together working two jobs.
There's also Stu's sister--the film's narrator--Lidia (Lexi Randall). If you've seen the trailers, you know that her theme is racial harmony. She accepts her two black friends, Elvadine (LaToya Chisholm) and Amber (Charlette Julius), as equals, and stands up for them against a segregation-minded summer-school teacher, Miss Strapford (Christine Baranski).
But the main theme is Stu--and his tree fort. Lidia and her friends have gotten the materials for it, and he'll build it with them and his two friends, Chet (Adam Henderson) and Marsh (Brennan Gallagher). Unfortunately, the girls got the materials from the junkyard of a local drunk, Mr. Lipnicki (Raynor Scheine), whose six kids are apparently the local bullies and thugs. When they find out, we'll have The War for which THE WAR is named.
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If you've seen any reviews or previews, you should already know whether THE WAR will likely turn you off. If you can't stand sermons, you're in trouble.
The trailer shows that Miss Strapford has put the black kids in the back. And it gives us Lidia's sermon on the subject. I have no problem with a 12-year-old *feeling* the way Lidia did. But (except for the rustic grammar) being able to give that speech would mean that momma and poppa were profs at the local college. (The sermon-sensitive can be reassured on one point, though: This is *not* a hate letter to the South. Miss Strapford is the only one who really drags race in, and she's more dorky than malicious.)
Costner, too, has lines that smack of college followed by years writing editorials for the crusading small-town weekly newspaper beloved of film makers in the 30s and 40s. He's Will Rogers updated and suspicious of violence in all forms. He's the peaceable guy in the western who saves the town from the bad guys.
Momma doesn't have too many lines, but she could be a saint in some 30s/40s film about farm workers or factory help. She's the rock of strength who's still thoroughly womanly. It may be 1970, but mom and dad remind me of Depression-era photos from the Farm Security Administration. And their speeches and sermons have attracted the most attention.
But *Stu* is the center of THE WAR. And it's as if Stu's role was written separately from those of the others. Stu seems more real. True, he's more rough-hewn eloquent than any 12-year-old I've ever known. True, he has major "speeches". But they seem to arise out of his character rather than out of a political tract. He is saying what he's feeling rather than informing others what they ought to feel or do.
The only other characters who struck me as real were the Lipnicki kids. (By the way, like Stu, *they don't give sermons*.) It's like McWorter had really seen something like this as a kid, and then years later added in other characters and events to make the "meaning" clear.
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Is the *acting* why I find Stu believable, but not the rest? Wood is just massively talented, after all. He makes even his "speeches" real and moving. Maybe he just did a 12-year-old boy better than Costner, Winningham, and Randall did their roles.
Unfortunately, I can't imagine *anyone* being able to handle some of their lines without seeming preachy. Take one of Stephen's comments to Stu:
I can't tell you never to fight. But if you want to know
what I think. .... I think the only thing that truly keeps
people safe and happy is love. And in the absence of love,
there's nothing in this world worth fightin' for.
In fact (if you're not sermon-allergic), Costner made even the sermons seem real. And at the end of a confrontation with Lipnicki, he didn't even seem preachy.
But I said there were two stories in THE WAR. If the vocal one is the sermons, what about the underlying one?
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Practically from word one, I was at a distance from THE WAR. *Everyone* speaks Southern. My background is small-town, but it's small-town Rhode Island. I haven't dealt with people with "un-colleged" Southern accents since I was in the Navy. (And they didn't do sermons.)
Maybe it was the slight culture shock that made me compare the rules of my own kidhood with how things worked in THE WAR. The Lipnickis say Stu's trespassing on "their" land near the junkyard. But is it theirs? Lidia says they're squatters even on the junkyard itself. And there's stuff in the junkyard from the Simmons's condemned house. Nonetheless, with Lidia is a thoroughly calculating kid, and with her decision to heist stuff from the junkyard, she crossed a major boundary.
Suburbanization has been less destructive in Rhode Island than elsewhere. Even today, a "Private" or "No Trespassing" sign strikes me as profoundly bad taste. As a kid I went wherever I went, and so did all the other kids. But once someone put that sign up, it was to be respected (or violated with only the greatest caution and suitable guilt if caught). People who put up such signs might be paranoid jerks. But it was *their* property. That was that.
So also junkyards. It might be worthless trash, but it was *their* worthless trash. (Junkyards can still be still a *cause celebre* back home--the owners are seen as the victims of new suburbanites who want to drive out those who were there first.)
Without much context, I mentioned the property-right proscriptions of small-town Rhode Island to a friend. He groaned. It seemed rigid, puritanical, unrealistic.
But stop and think--if those rules had been observed, the War in THE WAR would never have happened.
Can we have an anti-war film that doesn't ask how wars *start*? *The War* never gives a sermon about trespass, about turf battles, about the ambiguities of squatters, about filching junk--but without them, there would have been no film.
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Now, a story. A friend in my Reserve unit was a pacifist. (He'd already been on active duty: real life has its paradoxes!) He was in college and working in a factory to pay bills. There was this one guy who just harassed him endlessly--I mean, a college kid, a pacifist, why not? So, finally, my friend decked him. After that, the other guy was his best friend at work!
(Understanding the guy was an intellectual problem for my friend, matching the moral problem he had with decking him.)
I'll give no spoilers about THE WAR, but I'll say that we don't get the tidy outcome my friend did. Nonetheless, the usefulness -- even the *need*--of standing up and fighting for what's *yours* is an absolutely essential element in THE WAR--for *both* Stu and the Lipnickis.
And the Lipnicki kids are sort of like that factory worker. They're not necessarily bad kids; they're probably better than we might expect them to be, considering their father. They're thugs, sort of, but are they really bullies? We don't see them seeking smaller kids to pick on; it's more that they run roughshod, that they go too far with a grudge.
How do you deal with them? Stu had to decide.
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THE WAR appears to be very deliberately written. As *talk*, all the threads are tied together; there are no loose ends. Everything is explained. To which my response is a polite, "That's nice."
But the *action*, the story about Stu and the Lipnicki kids is *all* loose ends. We don't know how it began. We don't get a speech from Stu explaining all his motives. (Not that we need any.) We don't know how Stu and the Lipnickis viewed each other or their war afterward. We don't know what they "did with it".
The underlying story is live and real. It asks why we get into messes with each other. For me, it demands we ask whether dour small-towners might have figured out a way to avoid a lot of nastiness.
It also asks what we do when when people go too far. Yes, it intersects with the talk in warning that the violence is risky--don't let it get out of hand. (It might be interesting to consider whether the *action* of THE WAR could serve as an allegory of U.S. involvement in Viet Nam.)
In any event, the story of the action isn't a sermon; it's a challenge. It doesn't come back with a clear answer.
That's up to *us*.
John Walker walkerj@access.digex.net
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