The most electrifying moment in any American movie this summer comes halfway through "Forrest Gump," when Private Gump, who's just won the Congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam, is visiting his beloved Jenny at the headquarters of one of the huge Washington peace marches. Having no politics, he sees no contradiction in this and no irony. In his goofy green suit and goofy plain mind, Forrest is slow to pick up that the peace marchers are decamping. He clings to Jenny even when her boyfriend, a high muckety-muck in the peace movement, orders her to get going.
When she balks, the peacenik smashes her in the face.
It's shocking because it so utterly reverses our expectations. In so many films, peace demonstrators have been portrayed as custodians of America's soul, brave and courageous young people who halted the evil war in Vietnam, where our soldiers were busy massacring peasants. Now here's director Robert Zemeckis, in a movie about a simpleton, pointing out a complexity -- that the people who protested the war weren't axiomatic saints or martyrs; they were just human beings, as prone to weakness and ugliness as any of us.
It may be an example of the aggressive centrism of "Forrest Gump" that it refuses to apotheosize the crusade that had so much to do with the end of the Vietnam war, just as it refuses to condemn the soldiers. On the other hand, it may be part of a subtle change dating from the Persian Gulf war -- which the movies, those barometers of social nuance, are sometimes absurdly sensitive to, while remaining utterly unself-conscious of what they're doing.
What is clear is that, regardless of explicit politics, "Forrest Gump" is a movie that invests its compassion in the men who fought the war, not the people who tried to stop it. One of the film's most harrowing passages -- its only stint of true dramatic storytelling -- follows Forrest and his platoon on several patrols in Vietnam, introduces us to the men as characters, not as caricatures, and lets us witness the agony of their deaths and experience the rage and fury at their loss. It never says: The war in Vietnam was a bad thing and all those who fought it were war criminals. It says: Fighting wars is very hard on young men, and when they die it is a tragedy.
The crucial character isn't really Forrest at all: He's too dim a lump of clay. Rather, it's Gary Sinese's Lieutenant Dan, Forrest's platoon leader. Contrast him with, say, "El Tee," the callow lieutenant in "Platoon," to get an indication at how these attitudes have changed.
In "Platoon," the "El Tee" (a disrespectful distillation of the abbreviation "Lt.") is a figurehead, out of his depth, a dangerous boy. In base camp, he wanders about in his Ohio State sweat shirt trying to bond with the boys, who always reject him. The true power in the platoon belongs to Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger), who expresses his contempt for the young officer at every turn. At one point, so marginalized has the officer become, El Tee even says he doesn't care about the platoon anymore. In the end, he's so utterly irrelevant that even his death has no dramatic weight; he perishes wordlessly offscreen. El Tee stands for the corruption of the military ideal of the young leader: He's callow, worthless and overmatched, and his position is a display of an institution that has lost its control as well as its honor.
Sinese's Lieutenant Dan, on the other hand, is a professional soldier, as well as being the only real character in the movie (and the best performance, but don't tell Hanks). He runs his platoon, he's compassionate toward his men, he's committed to the mission. It is his darkest tragedy that in honorable pursuit of his objectives, he loses his legs and sinks into angry bitterness. Yet in "Forrest Gump," his is the most redemptive journey; he finds a way back from his anger. The movie's most poignant image, for my money, is the final shot of him on his new legs in his new suit, aware that in his eyes, he's a whole man again, even as we've known that, legs or no, he was always whole.
Making a comeback
Take a bow, little guy. The G.I. has come marching back. You can see it cropping up in a couple of other films this summer, as if it's a boomlet on the way toward being a boom. For example, it's clearly the one impulse behind the dreadful Pauly Shore thing, "In the Army Now."
Not to be confused with an actual motion picture, "In the Army Now" repeats the pattern of many service comedies, following a complete goof-up through basic training and then into battle. But even the subversive antics of Shore, an MTV icon whose primary gift is his ability to enrage parents and other authority figures, can't obscure the fundamentally conservative nature of this film.
It actually harks back to an old Midwestern saying about the Army, which became the title of an ironic World War II novel: "It'll do him," they used to say, "a world of good."
That's what it does Pauly Shore. Look at it closely: It documents Shore's journey through the crucible of military service, and ultimately combat, toward manhood. Far from being a subversive sendup of the armed forces, with a subtext of rage at the rigidity and hypocrisy of the professional military, it's actually an endorsement of the system.
When first we see him, Shore is a total dweeb-loser, whose gleeful anarchism and incompetence are quickly displayed as the movie celebrates his deconstruction of the mall electronics store that was foolish enough to hire him. He joins the military -- the reserves, actually -- for the most cynical of reasons: to get the enlistment bonus while committing to a military career that offers the lowest chance of danger.
Of course, he's the company screw-up all through basic training. Yet the movie never represents the service itself as unreasonable or its system as unjust. Instead, it watches as Shore ultimately gets with the program, a trend that finally pays off in a poorly imagined combat sequence set in the African desert.
World War II sentiment
Again, no politics intrude. The filmmakers don't engage the domestic difficulties in sustaining a ground war in Africa; they simply call it up as a given, much in the way a World War II movie -- but never a Vietnam movie -- took the goodness of Our Cause for granted. Indeed, the last act of "In the Army Now" feels patterned after a World War II movie; it seems like an MTV version of the forgotten old Henry Fonda-Thomas Mitchell piece, "The Immortal Sergeant," about a shy corporal who inherits command of a small unit in the desert and leads it on a difficult mission, while doubting himself every step of the way.
That's exactly the situation Shore inherits and, like Fonda, he manages to bring it off -- though nothing is imagined with the same intensity as in the original picture. At least in "The Immortal Sergeant" the producers were honest about war; in "In the Army Now," the ultimate product of the infantry -- death -- is banished from the screen.
In the end, somehow we are given to understand that Shore has become exactly that which would have been most unpredictable for him back in his MTV days -- he's become a man. Clearly the military had input in "In the Army Now," just as it has a vested interest in the idea the movie pushes, which is the core of the recruiting pitch. When Shore becomes all he can be, it's not ironically, but literally.
Finally, there's the mega-giant "Clear and Present Danger," drawn from the Tom Clancy novel. Though this film nominally investigates the possibility of practitioners of realpolitik commandeering the national security system to pursue anti-constitutional policies (undeclared wars), at the same time it clearly delineates a classic military theme, particularly one that became au courant after the dreary and embittering end of the Vietnam war -- that is, the dichotomy between the honorable soldiers on the ground and the treacherous politicians in Washington.
Clancy, and through him the filmmakers, have a sentimental attachment to the soldiers and a dogface's contempt for the suits. In this case, a small unit of highly trained and highly motivated light infantrymen (not Special Forces) is inserted into Colombia to wage low-intensity warfare on the drug cartel's cocaine manufacturing infrastructure. Director Phillip Noyce loves to portray these American ninjas in action. With their camouflage tunics, silenced M-16s and sniper rifles, they wage a quiet, courageous guerrilla campaign on the cocaine importers. A good deal of the film's considerable visceral energy is generated by following these tough guys into action.
Meanwhile, back in D.C., the two technocrats who initiated the action make an agreement with the very object of the war -- an ambitious cocaine terrorist, eager to take over the cartel. They make a separate peace with him, sell out and quite cold-bloodedly betray the fighting men by turning over maps and communications information. It's probably the secret fantasy of every professional soldier who came home from Vietnam with a bitter aftertaste: the sense that they were betrayed at home.
As Clancy has it, and as Noyce and his production team dramatize it, the movie comes to revolve around a completely ad hoc attempt to rescue the few survivors of this mission. It's where the sleek, well-designed movie goes wrong -- we don't want to see amateurs stumbling through a goofy rescue mission, but professional soldiers pulling off a state-of-the-art raid -- and a stroke from which it never really recovers.
But what's important is the value that propels the plot: the love of soldiers. It is at the center of "Clear and Present Danger," as well as at the heart of the other two films. Taken collectively, they seem to be arguing something that perhaps should be considered now that some national leaders are contemplating sending young men into such places as Haiti and Rwanda. It's a very simple message -- they are not expendable.