HEAVEN & EARTH
A film review by Ralf Benner
Copyright 1995 Ralf Benner
Perhaps somewhere in the annals of forgotten intentions, director Oliver Stone might have said to some hack reporter that he had always had in mind a trilogy of movies about the Vietnam War. The first, PLATOON, about the actual war itself from a G.I.'s perspective; the second, BORN ON THE 4TH OF JULY, about a war hero who returns to America to discover he's more despised than hailed; and a third--WHEAVEN & EARTH bring this up because one of Stone's problems has always been his inability to one-on-one sell his own product because he's constantly shifting positions: he seems to say one thing one day about his movies, and yet in another interview on another day say something else entirely, often contradicting himself. This was most obvious and disturbing when conservatives jumped all over him about JFK; Stone wouldn't admit that, as a refuter, he rigged his grand mal of invective against the Warren Report. Instead he fulminated against his critics for perpetuating the grander lie. Fair minded viewers quickly perceived that JFK was a composite of theories, not really meant to be at all definitive but exploratory--spasms of conjecture to tantalize and reel us with possibilities and at the same time admonish us for acquiescing to the volumes of purported facts. JFK was dazzling, work-me-over movie making in the worst traditions of yellow press muckraking: when we left the theatre, we conjured up the worst scenarios for just about everybody, and this kind of cynicism was and remains the movie's clarion attraction. With an eye on the box office, Stone elicited his detractors' often meaningless barrages--I'm thinking of some of George Will's pomposity in defending status quo--and never truer than when, on 60 Minutes, Andy Rooney made an ass of himself (and unwittingly confirmed Stone's legitimate deploring of a lazy press before the National Press Club in Washington) by trying to joke that Stone was this era's Orson Welles looking for his Rosebud. JFK is not Stone's CITIZEN KANE. Far from it. Had the movies' preeminent contrarian shown class instead of boxing himself in, he might have said that he made his own and much more exciting, horrifying and brutal MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE.
It is of course the quicksand that Stone, equal parts product and producer of media splurge, can't resist: he likes to go the edges of the pits he creates, and even if he tumbles into some of them, as he did as writer for the exploiting MIDNIGHT EXPRESS and as director for BORN ON THE 4TH OF JULY, somehow he rescues himself by sheer gall and temerity, which, as Americans, we often cheer more than we do those who show respect for history or nations other than our own. These are movies that Stone owes us an apology for; these two false, pitched melodramas, reeking with fabricated scenes and utterances and ultra-bad casting (Tom Cruise as a paraplegic vet?), received the kind of attention that later embarrasses the rational-minded--we realize that all the hysteria comes from vengeful emotionality, in order to subvert and controvert facts and humiliations. There's not a god damn thing that's admirable about Billy Hayes's story in MIDNIGHT EXPRESS; and there's only pitiful contempt for those who continue to fight the Vietnam War until they somehow win what they deserved to lose.
Stone's frenzied method of reportage is undeniably what makes him suspicious to many of us--he takes "true stories" and propagandizes not the factual incidents themselves but the circumstances surrounding them. It's defensible with JFK because Stone was using thirty years worth of everyone else's conspiracies and suppositions. It's indefensible regarding the overwrought BORN ON THE 4TH OF JULY: as pointed out by others, reel-life Ron Kovic evaded the major question: "Why did the government tell lies about what the Vietnam War was about?" Because PLATOON was based, more or less, on Stone's own experiences during the Vietnam War, questioning his veracity would be dangerous, and I didn't when I first saw the movie, and, despite my strong misgivings about HEAVEN & EARTH, I don't now. PLATOON had the feel of truth, of real experience in it, and I think the reactions of our nation's Vietnam Vets was--and remains--the more significant testimonial. They responded to it as if it were a catharsis; they left theatres shaken, or crying, or sobbing, their pain of waste & dissolution given a salve. When Jane Fonda attacked THE DEER HUNTER as racist, she was once more pounced on as a traitor, but this time she was absolutely right: Michael Cimino made a political tract that only temporarily gave us the excuse we sought to feel smug and superior to a tiny country that, short of nuking, we attempted to bomb into oblivion and in the process helped kill more than two million of its citizens and injured another three million. This is why few can watch that movie anymore--it being so egregiously slanted to protect ourselves from our own crimes. And this is most likely why PLATOON had such an incredible impact only nine years later: despite all the amateurish literary flourishes spoken by Charlie Sheen, despite the appallingly effective misuse of Barber's "Adagio for Strings" during some of the movie's most horrific moments, PLATOON was an "everyman's" epiphany of our government's nearly intractable dumbheadedness. And it did something more: it intimated how frequently our military's hierarchy left our men in the lurch, to defend themselves and die as their commanders, in the relative safety of Saigon or Washington, were lying to an American press. One of the quietly satisfying aspects about the success of PLATOON is that while some movie critics, National Guard right-wingers and draft-dodgers were proclaiming that they "didn't like it," the fact is, this is categorically not a movie to like or dislike, to love or hate; based on one's own experiences, you're either moved by what it's saying and suggesting or you're not. I knew this movie was and would stay on the right track when, during its opening, we watched the new G.I.s getting off their transports as others--in body bags--were being loaded onto those transports. I've still got in my memory banks many images of the war, but none more evoking of stronger emotions than this. I'm a Vietnam-era vet who unaccountably spent his term of service in the Baroque whimsy of Wurzburg, Germany and whose cushy job it was to administratively process servicemen to and from other military posts and during interviews with those who had been to Vietnam, the reactions were almost always the same: the initial shock and sudden realization of possible death when they saw the rows of corpses. Those images were never discussed in basic and individual training, those images hadn't yet appeared in Stars & Stripes, they were rarely spoken of on Armed Forces Radio, but they were the subject of endless conversations in the barracks, in the mess halls. We didn't know what post traumatic stress syndrome was in those days--it probably hadn't even been coined yet--but we could tell who served in Vietnam when we heard the screams from hellish nightmares during the night.
HEAVEN & EARTH, based on two non-fiction books that are accounts of Vietnamese surviving their country's war years, opens with paradisical shots of agricultural lands and jutting mountains with low clouds passing through them--the kind of setting one might imagine would be the end result of the Genesis Device in STAR TREK: THE WRATH OF KHAN. The beauty of it all is Stone saying, "This is what it was like before we got there." Soon after, when the American helicopters and napalm arrive, we get the burnt out fields and villages, with Stone lecturing, "This is what it was like after we got there." Stone has said repeatedly that HEAVEN & EARTH is a glimpse of what the Vietnamese went through during the time the French and most specifically the Americans descended upon them. But HEAVEN & EARTH is not about the Vietnamese proles--it's about an American movie maker's view of what a Vietnamese woman, lucky enough to escape, endures through Americanization. This is not a minor quibble, it's a major beef. This is no more a movie about how the Vietnamese people lived through the inferno mostly created by other nations--China, France, Japan, France again, America, and China once more--than BORN ON THE 4TH OF JULY is about a disillusioned war hero returning to a jaded homeland. HEAVEN & EARTH is not overtly fraudulent--there probably isn't a major scene that didn't happen to either the principals or others--but it feels very fraudulent. Except for a few terrorist threats by (we assume) the Viet Cong, who warn the peasant farmers against betraying the motherland, there's no believability that these Vietnamese have any defining politics or even pride in nationality. Worse, the bits and pieces of their struggles to maintain a crazy kind of normalcy in daily living amidst the incursions are, if not rehash from all the other Vietnam War movies, then cursory. Were there no schools for the kids? Did no teens or young adults date and fall in love? There's a flimsy, slow-motion reach towards Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS a la APOCALYPSE NOW to remind us of war's inherent insanity but eventually the movie tires itself out and becomes a rather mild, less affecting KILLING FIELDS--we even get Haing S. Nor as a loving father searching for his pregnant daughter, reminiscent of Sam Waterston's pursuit of Nor himself.
During the opening, we get a very truncated narration by the movie's heroine--played by newcomer Hiep Thi Le--that attempts to establish perfunctory facts. The facts are misleading: while I couldn't swear to what Stone has her saying exactly, because it's soft-spoken enough to miss parts, there is a major reference to the defeat of the French (at Dien Bien Phu) in 1954, which, by Stone's account, precipitated American intervention. Not quite right: though the French did depart in 1954, and though there was a brief diplomatic solution known as the Geneva Accord which separated Vietnam into North and South, providing a lull in major fighting until 1959 when Ho Chi Minh stepped up gorilla warfare to further weaken the South's already precarious government, and though the U.S. was sending "advisors" steadily until 1965 when President Johnson ordered large numbers of troops to intervene to save the South, the American government, under Truman, was already and very directly involved in the re-colonization of Indochina by France in 1946.
While FDR adamantly and Truman less so opposed France's return there, because it defied the American principle of independence for all nations, and though both presidents were suspicious of France in that it had cruelly exploited Vietnam in the past and despite France's promise to grant autonomy to the Vietnamese probably wouldn't (and didn't), the American position became one of acquiescence to France, most likely because Charles de Gaulle, humiliated by the quick, humiliating subjugation of his people to the Nazis, blackmailed Truman: If not permitted its undeserved spoils of the war, then France, already haughty with demands in the rebuilding of Europe, would resist cooperation in that reconstruction. France's return to Vietnam--facilitated by over 2 billion American 1940-50 dollars worth of transport ships and materials--enraged Ho Chi Minh rather understandably: America, a nation he had admired enormously, was betraying its principles, especially since Ho believed that, with the American pledge to grant independence to the Philippines, America indeed "was for the free popular governments all over the world and that it opposed colonialism in all its forms." (Ho had been appealing for his nation's independence since 1919, when he went to the Versailles Peace Conference to plead his case, but he had been turned away without so much as a single hearing.) By late 1945, Ho had sent at least eight appeals to Truman and the American Secretary of State, but they were ignored. War between the French and the Vietnamese started in late 1946 and would continue until the French were surrounded and nearly annihilated at Dien Bien Phu. The ominous but ignored cost to the French: over 50,000 lives, 100,000 injuries. Part of Ho's brief triumph when the French departed was the knowledge that he also defeated America the betrayer. Though Ho died before his countrymen would defeat America a second time, there must be among Vietnamese an additional yet savory satisfaction in the victory: that we did not learn from history, even failing to learn from yesterday's failed military tactics. In a communique written in 1945 to de Gaulle by Bao Dai, the last Emperor of Indochina, this was prophesied: "Even if you come to re-establish a French administration here, it will no longer be obeyed: each village will be a nest of resistance, each former collaborator an enemy, and your officials and colonists will themselves ask to leave this atmosphere which they will unable to breathe."
Technically, none of this is what the movie is all about, but remember, it's Stone who's telling us that he's made a people-of-Vietnam movie from their perspective, which, reiterating, he most certainly is not. What HEAVEN & EARTH seems to be about is karma, and rather tragi-yellow karma to boot: it suggests that the sum and consequences of the heroine's life determined her fate--that she might have deserved to be raped, that she was destined to meet and marry psycho Sad Sack Tommy Lee Jones, that despite her capitalist success in America she would return home to hear her brother scold her and America for its continual punishment of her motherland that never deserved to be the pawn it became in global power strategies. As such, Hiep Thi Le, a pre-med student in California, is surprisingly competent. Like the abused, neglected heroines proverbially carrying coals to New Castle in American period-piece literature, Hiep Thi Le is required to be weighted down and become the embodiment of the rice-fed Vietnamese constitution; despite the upholstery-like coifs that make her look stereotypically China Doll trampy, she sticks to you. (She's also got the movie's only honest bit: when she jumps off a helicopter, with child in tow, her purse falls to her knees, then feet. She's also in a scene that puts the fact checkers on the spot: there's a banner advertising "double coupons" at the California grocery chain Ralphs.)
The last time I saw Joan Chen, who plays Hiep's mother, was in Bertolucci's snoozer THE LAST EMPEROR. So fancily pictorial she seemed a poster; there was more drama in the lobby stills of her than in the movie itself. And there was something unconvincing about her makeup: she didn't age "naturally," she looked comically fakey. This doesn't happen to her here: while it takes time to get passed her mouth full of rotten dentistry (or a lack of it, I could never tell for sure), she's stunningly cosmeticized, you really believe what you see. Her voice and face now have a nobility you can't stop absorbing--she's a hybrid of Glenn Close and Jessica Lange, with a slight amount of Olivia Cole as a finishing touch. In her last scenes, you realize it is her story that you want to see, that she is the salt of Vietnam's earth Stone has tried to turn Hiep Thi Le into. This odd reversal happened in THE LAST EMPEROR: at the beginning, when the dying empress, sounding like Meryl Streep doing her OUT OF AFRICA routine, informed the young emperor he'll inherit the throne, we're mesmerized: she's so debauched, evil-eyed and practically levitating in the splendiferous surroundings of the imperial palace--not unlike Jabba the Hut in THE RETURN OF THE JEDI--that when the movie concluded, I flashed back to her, regretting that I didn't see THE LAST EMPRESS. When Hiep delivers the earth mother bromides--the kind of platitudes all mothers want to hear, and, in fact, HEAVEN & EARTH is dedicated to Stone's own mother--it's Joan Chen who should be speaking.
Someday a director will pick up THE TUNNELS OF CU CHI by Tom Mangold and John Penycate and realize it's the book that America needs as a movie. (Anyone who's read it never forgets the snake.) With Mel Gibson, whose frame and Stoogy risk-taking are perfect for traversing those tunnels which terrorized Americans and are, in any variety of ways, the real metaphor of Vietnam. Without them, without the tenacity involved in building and maintaining them, it might have been possible for the American military killing experts to defeat the spirit of the Vietnamese. The only movie that has come close to showing the terror of those tunnels--but too briefly--is Brian De Palma's over-praised and rightly rebuffed CASUALTIES OF WAR. Though CASUALTIES OF WAR is based on fact, it loses its indictable punch in that rape and the death of the raped aren't exclusive to the horror of war; movies using rape to pontificate become cliches because, in a measure of our desensitized times, rape is no longer as horrible as it is anticipatory symptom, and it never explains the political machinations that result in war. According to a blurb Pauline Kael gave to De Palma to use in the ads--a blurb that did not show up in her lengthy review--CASUALTIES OF WAR is the "greatest of the Vietnam War movies." Similar to Larry King's fourteen word blurb about HEAVEN & EARTH, hyperbolic nonsense has a way of biting back, like bad karma. The ultimate Vietnam War movie would be the one that shows us that the enemy who never had to be knew us and our weaknesses better than we did. The more self-incriminating anti-war movie will be the one that reveals American immaturity--exposing our national inability to accept the harsher reality of having lost a war we never had any business getting involved in. Vietnam vets have a right to rage against Robert McNamara and his IN RETROSPECT. One of the principal architects of youth in Asia, McNamara acknowledges the war's meaninglessness, but, having learned from the right wing crybabies, he blames everyone else.
-- RalfBenner@aol.com
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