MEN WITH GUNS
By Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Sony Pictures Classics Director: John Sayles Writer: John Sayles Cast: Federico Luppi, Damian Delgado, Dan Rivera Gonzalez, Tania Cruz, Damian Alcazar, Mandy Patinkin, Kathryn Grody, Iguandilli Lopez, Nandy Luna Ramirez, Rafael De Quevedo, Roverto Sosa
Who are the world's bad guys? Are they the folks from the industrialized world who rape and plunder the weaker nations? Are they the world's white guys who exploit those of color? The down-and-out guerrillas who commit atrocities against seemingly innocent villagers? The rich? The poor? The liberals? The conservatives? Inspired by stories from the novelist Francisco Goldman, who wrote of an uncle who administered medicine to poor communities in Guatemala, John Sayles has written, directed and edited a road movie of mythic proportions to expound on this question. His answer to the riddle? The title gives it all away. Men with guns are the abhorrent of the earth. No matter whether you're white or black, rich or poor, western or developing: if you've got the weaponry, you'll use it, and the power which you get from superior military might will corrupt you. You will use the authority of the gun to rape, plunder, and decide arbitrarily who is guilty and deserving of punishment.
"Men with Guns" will not enjoy the commercial power that a Costa-Gavras film like "Z" possessed, largely because it is almost totally in Spanish and Indian dialects (with subtitles) and because the editing--which Sayles insists on doing himself rather than hiring a professional--is pedestrian. Nor does "Men With Guns" have the complexity of his world-class movie, "Lone Star," or a single name recognizable (save Mandy Patinkin) by a potentially large market. Yet there is not a single dull moment in the picture even as it trudges along from one destination to another, each stop on the road adding to the political wisdom of its central character.
The movie focuses on an elderly white doctor of liberal persuasion living in a fictitious Latin American country. Filmed entirely in Mexico, Sayles fixes his camera on Dr. Fuentes (Federico Luppi), who had recently lost his wife, is on the verge of retirement, and is determined to find out first- hand whether the legacy he has willed to the world is successful. Having trained a group of bright young doctors to go barefoot--so to speak--into the poor Indian villages of his country to bring them the medicine they so desperately need but cannot afford, he sets out from his well-appointed suburban home to track his students down. Though his now- ailing heart is in the right place, Humberto Fuentes is politically naive, refusing to believe that outside the big cities looms disastrous instability. He is to discover first-hand that his is not the best of all possible worlds. His first adventure graphically symbolizes the disillusionment he will face on his political, emotional, moral and, indeed, metaphoric journey, as he discovers his brightest student Bravo (Roverto Sosa) operating a drug market in a slum neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.
Though police officers assure him that there are no guerrillas in the areas under their command, they warn him to return to the capital, but their advice simply drives Fuentes on as he barrels into the mountain with his rugged vehicle picking up a hodgepodge of unusual, deeply flawed people. These include an abandoned, streetwise boy, Conejo (Dan Rivera Gonzalez), an army deserted Domingo (Damian Delgado) who robs him and later begs him to remove a bullet from his rib, a defrocked priest (Damian Alcazar), and a comical couple of clueless American tourists played by Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody.
If the movie were made by Costa-Gavras, the doctor would conclude that the army, backed up by a right-wing government, is the source of all evil. But Sayles spreads the guilt around. True, the members of the armed forces have been killing doctors and other intellectuals, assuming that anyone helping the poor Indians must be subversive. But the guerrillas have been terrorizing the local populations as well, executing those whom they believe are assisting the army. The Indians, ignorant and superstitious, for the most part refuse to talk to the white stranger.
Sayles seems to say that despite the doctor's excellent intentions he has spent his life in deliberate ignorance, so dedicated to his comfortable, bourgeois lifestyle that he refuses to believe that the people of his country could be murderers and rapists. In that regard, Sayles shares the stage with playwright Bertolt Brecht, who naively believed that his plays could awaken his middle-class audience to the wickedness to which they have closed their eyes and ears.
Sayles reaches far and wide. We leave the film aware that he is not talking about any specific country: that Latin American dictatorships are surely not afflicted with the very worst forms of rule. In one case, for example, he has the defrocked priest tell an obviously autobiographical story of how guerrillas ordered the people of a village to execute six of their own people, failing which the terrorists would kill every member of the community. This can be taken as a reference to the practice in Nazi concentration camps in which capos were occasionally asked to make the selections themselves of those who should be sent immediately to their deaths lest entire groups be wiped out by the SS themselves. On the broadest scale, the film makes its point loud and clear that those with the superior firepower will inflict their will by force on those with more modest defenses, and have done so time and again throughout the centuries.
The MTV crowd is not Sayles's targeted audience for this movie. Despite the theme that life's tragedies are circular, that they endure time and again whether or not we "know" about them, the movie will win no prizes for visual pyrodynamics but seems a throwback to a time that movie- makers were content to tell solid, linear narratives. That said, the right audience will find much that is appealing in the film, not the least attribute being the sincere, earthy acting of the entire cast of relative unknowns. Rated R. Running Time: 126 minutes. (C) 1997 Harvey Karten
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