JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: One of the best cinematic arguments against war, courtesy of Dalton Trumbo's scarifying novel. And a very touching movie to boot.
I've always hated "message" films -- basically, any movie where it's plain that the director is trying to preach. Dalton Trumbo made his antiwar stance plain when he originally wrote JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN as a novel in the late Thirties, but he did it in a way that no one else even dared to imitate. When his novel was adapted for the screen and directed by himself during the vitriolic years of the Vietnam War, it got rediscovered by college students worldwide, and has remained continually in print ever since. The book stood against war by providing the most gut-level argument imaginable, and the movie works in the same desperate spirit.
Joe Bonham (Timothy Bottoms) is a fresh-faced young man who lives in a Rockwell-esque America that has not yet discovered the horror that is World War I. When the war breaks out, he enlists -- there is a lovely scene where he spends one last night with his Irish girlfriend -- and is sent into the thick of battle. While on the front lines, he is sent into no-man's-land to bury a solider's corpse, and is shelled.
The movie works in flashbacks, starting with the greviously injured Joe and working our way backwards and forwards through his memory. The movie makes it inexorably clear that because of the severity of Joe's wounds, the Army doesn't even think he's anything more than a vegetable (they call him "decerebrated" as a way of distancing themselves from what has happened to him). We hear Joe's thoughts as he tries to figure out what has happened, and as he tries to find ways of coping with his horribly damaged body.
He does, and he even manages to find a way to communicate with the outside world, much to the astonishment of his attendants. What happens from there on out is the core of the movie's "message", and I won't reveal it, but I will say that it serves more as the context for everything else that happens in the movie, rather than its only reason to exist. We learn a great deal about Joe, aside from his horrendous lot in life, and the movie makes its point very plainly by developing Joe as an individual and not a mere basket case.
One of the most astonishing things about the movie's history came from its originally being rated X upon release -- not because of a (later excised) nude scene, but because the MPAA felt that the movie's anti-war theme was inherently adult. (The rating was later overturned.) Today, such a thing would probably be unthinkable, but it serves as a chilling barometer of how unconfortable most of America was with dissenting opinions in popular culture.
Francois Truffaut once said that no war film could be truly anti-war, because it would end up making war look glamorous and exciting. I imagine it was more than a coincidence that he named JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN one of his favorite films of all time before he died. It sets out to break your heart, rather than enlist it, and it does that very well.
Three and a half out of four fishing rods.
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