We
Were Soldiers Has Bravery and Heart ...
but Don't Call It Braveheart!
We
Were Soldiers Has Bravery and Heart ...
My initial reaction leaving the theater following a recent screening of We Were Soldiers was the same one I have had after most great war films I've ever screened. I'm not worthy!
Jeez, I feel like such a putz watching incredibly brave men doing astoundingly brave things on distant battlefields. Yeah, I know it's just a movie. But We Were Soldiers is about real people, who went through a very harrowing and very real ordeal and lived--well, some of them did, at least--to tell the tale. What are my main concerns in life right now? Well, gosh. I have this slow computer that gets me steamed sometimes. I bit my tongue the other day, and it still smarts. My cat has gotten into the habit of eating the gravy off of her soft food, but not the food itself. Oh, and I had to have a brake job done on my car last week. When I got the bill, I actually said the words: "My life is Hell!"
Is my life really Hell? Of course not. I'll tell ya what's Hell. War is Hell! And no film depicts that better than We Were Soldiers. It's the story of the Ia Drang Valley, one of the first places Americans and North Vietnamese ever clashed in November of 1965.
Written and directed by Randall Wallace, We Were Soldiers stars Mel Gibson as Col. Harold "Hal" Moore. The film opens stateside as Moore teams up with Sgt. Maj. Basil Plumley (Sam Elliott) to train a new fighting force of men with new weapons to do battle in Vietnam. What distinguishes this film from other 'Nam pictures is twofold. First, the year is 1965. America had yet to become disenfranchised with the effort to stamp out Communism wherever it spread. The country was firmly behind the war in Vietnam, behind the military. Throughout We Were Soldiers, though, there is the nagging feeling of a country on a collision course with history ... bad history.
We Were Soldiers, though, rises above the tragedy of its main
story to become the captivating tale of survival against incredible odds.
Moore would end up leading a fighting force of 450 soldiers into a battle
against some 2,000 enemy troops. Wallace does a skillful job as director
and field general. When the shooting and explosions start, we experience
the battle from several different groups of characters in several different
jams. Wallace does quite a good job at putting us in each of their situations,
asking us: "What would we do? How would we handle it?" We are those characters,
pinned down, skulking for cover,
hoping for a miracle.
The second thing that distinguishes We Were Soldiers is the fact that the movie takes it time setting up the characters we follow into battle. Those who felt that Black Hawk Down was a great technical achievement, but lacked emotional depth will get both with this picture. The first hour depicts the officers' and soldiers' domestic lives back on base in America. We meet Gibson's wife, Julie (Madeleine Stowe), and his children. We are introduced to the young Lt. Jack Geoghegan (Chris Klein) and his wife, Barbara (Keri Russell), nine months pregnant with their first child. There are barbecues and social meetings, late-night prayers and heart-to-heart talks after the kids have gone to sleep. You don't want to care, because you know from the commercials that the Big Hurt is coming later. But the actors make you care, even the ones in underwritten roles.
Then, when the soldiers start falling on the field of battle, the movie shows us a character dying, then it shows his wife and family being informed back home. It shows the courage and compassion of Julie Moore and Barbara Geoghegan as they take it upon themselves to personally deliver the Army telegrams to each home. It shows the price of war.
Wallace is not the most subtle of directors. After all, this is the guy who wrote Braveheart and directed The Man in the Iron Mask. While he peppers his new film with nice character details, the big moments are what he excels at. The soldiers leaving for 'Nam in the middle of the night is one of the great, fight-back-the-tears cinematic sequences of the year. An opening slaughter of French soldiers at the hands of Vietnamese is as graphic as they come. And the scene where Moore addresses the assembled troops and tells them "dead or alive, we all go home" is part-Patton/part-William Wallace.
There, I said it. William Wallace. Mel Gibson's character in Braveheart. Braveheart will be the one film that most critics compare We Were Soldiers to when reviews hit this Friday. In truth, the movie does have some "Braveheart-esque" moments. But Hal Moore is NOT William Wallace. Anyone who says he is, anyone who makes that comparisons and gives this two stars or less because of it, is just being lazy and simple. Moore and Wallace fought wars for completely different reasons. They existed in vastly different worlds. And they had completely different fears and passions.
My personal criticisms of the film are minor. There is an African-American soldier under Moore's command who should have gotten more screen time considering how large of a role his wife plays back home. It would have made one moment in particular a lot more poignant if this character had been given the same screen time as, say, Klein's Jack Geoghegan or Greg Kinnear's daring helicopter pilot, Maj. Bruce Crandall. I also felt that the transition from homefront to warfront could have been handled a little better. Wallace puts us into the action so fast we are almost unprepared for it as viewers. The rest of the film is tight, vivid, stunning, and really quite remarkable.
In closing, I feel the need to address the violence factor. We Were Soldiers is extremely graphic, folks. You know how you leave some war films kind of energized? You almost feel you can pick up a rifle and go fight for God and country as the closing credits are rolling behind you. You won't feel that way after seeing We Were Soldiers. The film is damn truthful in showing its audience that a battlefield is the very last place on Earth you EVER want to find yourself.
I won't go into specifics. Men are shot. Men are blown up. Men are napalmed. Men are beaten to death. There are moments you will want to turn away from the screen, moments where you hope a guy gets put out of his misery quick. I never got the feeling that Randall Wallace was pumping up the violence to pornographic levels. The guy just went for realism and, ultimately, achieved a kind of hyper-realism. It's entirely possible that, in the end, this will be a film that you appreciate but not necessarily like.
Well, I more than liked this film. I loved it. We Were Soldiers is the first great motion picture of 2002.
We Were Soldiers is rated R for intense, graphic, and
sustained war violence and language.
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