Oliver Stone’s film about Ron Kovic is loud, long and given to sermons, and for stretches it is as strong as anything he has made. Tom Cruise’s Kovic and a hospital sequence we will not forget carry it past the speeches.
Ron Kovic grows up in Massapequa, on Long Island, with the birthday in the title. He plays soldiers in the woods, watches the parade every summer and listens to two Marines in dress blues tell a gymnasium of boys that the Corps takes only the best. Oliver Stone, who wrote the script with Kovic, follows him to Vietnam, to a bullet that leaves him paralysed from the chest down, and home to a country that has moved on without him. It runs 145 minutes and is loud for most of them. We think it is a good film, and about twenty minutes and several trumpet solos short of a fine one.
Robert Richardson shoots the Long Island childhood in a back-lit haze, sparklers and flags and a mother in a summer dress, so that we know this is a memory rather than a place. The film’s case is that pictures are what the boy went to war for. Kyra Sedgwick’s Donna gets a dance with him at the prom, in the rain, and Stone shoots it straight. Then the light goes white. Vietnam is bleached sand and a drained sky, and the firefights are chaos: nobody can see, everybody is shouting.
The veterans’ hospital is the sequence that decides the film, and it horrified us. Bruno Rubeo’s ward is green paint, rows of beds, rats on the floor and a pump that keeps stopping. The staff are too few and past caring, and when Kovic breaks his leg trying to prove he will walk again he is left strapped face down to a frame while the machinery fails around him. Joe Hutshing and David Brenner cut it long, without relief. What did it, for us, was not the rats. It was Cruise’s voice on the ward at night, asking for help in the tone of a man who already knows nobody is coming.
Cruise does not ask to be liked. The schoolboy Kovic is eager and foolish; the veteran is long-haired, moustached and drinking, wheeling himself into rooms where he is not wanted. The best scene in the film is a family one. Kovic comes home drunk and screams at his mother about what the war has taken from his body, in words she will not have in the house. Caroline Kava plays Mrs Kovic as a woman who cannot hear what her son is telling her, and Raymond J. Barry, as his father, gets through the row by picking things up off the floor and then carrying him up to bed.
A stretch in Mexico, in a town of bars and brothels full of men in wheelchairs, is the film at its sharpest. Willem Dafoe plays Charlie, another paralysed veteran, with a grin that has gone bad, and the argument he and Kovic have by the roadside, about which of them killed more children, is played without anyone reaching for a moral. Judy Ruskin Howell dresses the veterans in denim and army surplus, so that from a distance the beach looks like a bivouac.
What does not work is the volume. John Williams has written a trumpet theme of real beauty and Stone uses it every time he wants us to feel something, so that by the second hour a swell of brass has come to mean here it comes again. And the film shows Kovic’s anger far more carefully than his reasons. Most critics have taken his change of mind on trust because Cruise makes it believable. We believed him too. We just wanted to know what he had been told.
Set against Platoon, which Stone made three years earlier, this is the broader film and the less disciplined one. Platoon stayed in the jungle. This one wants the whole country, and the country does not fit in 145 minutes without somebody standing on a chair. It is an 18 certificate, and it earns that in the hospital rather than the jungle. Watch it in one sitting and do not skip the ward, however much you want to.
