100 BEST WAR MOVIES: 67. Courage Under Fire (1996)

 

                “Courage Under Fire” is a film by Edward Zwick (“Glory”) that uses a “Rashoman” structure to explore the fog of war, friendly fire, and post-traumatic stress disorder.  The movie reteams Zwick with his “Glory” star, Denzel Washington.  The script is by Patrick Sheane Duncan (“84 Charlie MoPic”).  It was released in 1996 and is one of two major motion pictures that are set in the Persian Gulf War.  The other being “Three Kings”.  Both films are what I simply call “modern war movies”.

            Washington plays Lt. Col. Nathan Serling.  Serling is suffering from PTSD due to a friendly fire incident during the Persian Gulf War.  While leading a tank assault on the opening night of the ground war (with burning oil wells in the background), he fires on a tank commanded by his friend Capt. Boylar.  The Army awards him a Silver Star for that night and covers up the incident.  He is put on a desk job, but he is haunted by the accident.  He is drinking and is separated from his family.   His commanding officer Brigadier General Hershberg (Michael Moriarity)  gives him an assignment to help him recover.  He is to investigate the possible awarding of the Medal of Honor to a female soldier.  The Army expects him to give the green light to this publicity bonanza, but Capt. Karen Walden’s (Meg Ryan) story is complicated.

            The official story is Walden flew her medevac Huey to rescue a downed Black Hawk crew.  In the process, the chopper gets shot down. One of the crew, Rady, was badly wounded.  They held out under fire through the night.  The next day they were rescued, but Walden was killed and left behind.  She’s a heroine, right?  Or was she actually a typically cowardly female?

            Walden interviews the surviving crew members and a “Rashoman” theme develops as there are two distinctly different versions of what happened.  Specialist Ilario (Matt Damon in his first big role) confirms Walden’s heroism, but his account is suspicious.  The film reenacts Ilario’s version.  The opposing view is offered by Staff Sergeant Monfriez (Lou Diamond Phillips).  He is a card-carrying member of the “He-Man Woman Haters” Club.  In his reenacted version he is Rambo and Walden is Olive Oil.  Who is telling the truth?  Is the Army trying to give a medal to Sally Piss Panties?

            Herschberg pressures Serling to issue a rubber-stamped report.  When he refuses, he is taken off the case.  Would you believe he decides to pursue the truth on his own?  (You’ve seen movies before, haven’t you?)  He is aided by, you guessed it, an investigative reporter named Gardner (Scott Glenn) who is actually investigating the friendly fire incident.  The subplots intersect.

            I won’t give away the rest.  There are some interesting twists.  We get to see what actually happened in reenactments of both the Walden scenario and the Serling friendly fire incident.  Everything is tied up in a nice, tearjerking ball.

ACTING:                      A

ACTION:                      N/A

ACCURACY:               N/A

PLOT:                           A+

REALISM:                   B

CINEMATOGRAPHY:     A+

SCORE:                        forgettable

BEST SCENE:  the battle

 

BEST QUOTE:    

Monfriez:  I hear something moving out here. I say we make the chopper *now*.

Captain Karen Emma Walden: And I say I heard enough of this shit.

Monfriez: You don't have to go. We don't even need your permission.

Captain Karen Emma Walden: I *am* in command here!

Monfriez: Well, maybe not anymore.

            This is a multi-layered movie.  It juggles several themes and two major plots.  The themes include:  shit happens in war (friendly fire), the military likes to cover up shit that happened, the authorities want heroes (or heroines) for the masses, PTSD can effect even the strongest personalities.  The plots of Serling dealing with his trauma and investigating the Walden case weave together effectively.  Duncan’s script is strong.  There are some cool twists.  The “Rashoman” elements are well done and entertaining.  It is not obvious which recreations are the truth.  It gets a bit hammy in the end, but remember this film was made for a mass audience, not for hard core war movie nuts.  It is not a cynical movie. 

            The movie is technically sound.  The cinematography is outstanding.  The combat scenes are visceral, if a little too pristine.  The soundtrack is restrained and does not push emotional buttons too much.  The acting is top notch.  No surprise that Washington is amazing.  He does tormented like no other.  His scenes with his wife (Regina Taylor) are powerful.  She holds her own, by the way.  If you want to see a master at work, watch his visit to Boylar’s parents to tell them the truth about their son’s death.  The rest of the cast is excellent.  You can see Damon’s promise as he portrays the drug-addled Ilario.  He lost forty pounds for the later scenes.  An example of method acting that damaged his health for a while.  Phillips is surprisingly good as the macho Monfriez.  He gets a great death.  Moriarity portrays the general as compassionate, but part of the establishment.  Glenn is appropriately rumpled as the news hound.  Kudos must go to Ryan.  She has to play too totally different characters in the flashbacks.  She pulls it off without looking silly.  No small feat.

            As far as accuracy, the movie is not based on a true story.  You can see a seed of inspiration from the incident in Black Hawk Down involving the snipers (Shughart and Gordon) that rescued Durant.  But, intentionally or not, I found the tale of Jessica Lynch to be another possible inspiration.  Lynch was captured during the war and the early press reports had her as a female warrior.  The truth turned out to be a lot tamer and less heroine-worthy.  The movie is a bit unrealistic on two accounts.  The tank tactics in the friendly fire incident has the M1A1 Abrams (actually disguised British Centurions due to DOD withdrawal of support for the film) virtually hub-to-hub in formation.  This isn’t the Napoleonic Wars, Zwick.  The medevac Huey is too well-armed for a chopper with a red cross on it.  These dudes were hardly noncombatants, but the movie does not make the case that the tank should not have fired on them and I can see where medevac crews might arm themselves beyond the Geneva Convention rules.  The dropping of the fuel cell is clearly ridiculous, but Hollywood has to have its explosions.

            “Courage Under Fire” got some love from the critics and did acceptable box office, but I am obviously a bigger fan than most.  I have read criticism of the conclusion, in particular.  However, if a movie can draw a tear from me, I’ll man up to it and say kudos.  Any other criticism of the plot is perplexing.  Some of it may be critics being critics and not reacting well to anyone attempting to copy “Rashoman”.  Boy, are they protective of those classics!  But since most people don’t have a clue about “Rashoman”, chill out.

            Sadly (and shamefully) I read a review by a war movie expert who I respect and he disliked the movie partly because he could not see a female soldier behaving bravely in combat.  That is bull shit!  Let’s face it, it may be against the law, but we have had females in combat since the Gulf War.  It’s just the nature of the “war with no front lines” that we have faced in Iraq and Afghanistan (and future locales).  I have read nothing to indicate that our female soldiers have become sniveling cowards when the bullets are flying around.  The Walden character is believe-able and in the not too distant future we will have our first female Medal of Honor awardee for combat action.  You go, girls!  

THE 100 BEST WAR MOVIES: #76. Three Kings (1999)

           

                 “Three Kings” is a war movie released in 1999.  It was written and directed by David Russell from a story idea by comedian John Ridley.  Ridley challenged himself to write a script in record time.  He finished “Spoils of War” in seven days.  Eighteen days later, Warner Brothers bought the script.  Russell was intrigued with the one sentence description of the plot -  “heist set in the Gulf War”.  Russell claims he did not even read Ridley’s script, he just took the idea and wrote his own script.  Russell was not even consulted.  He was given a “story by” credit, but there is still bad blood.  At the time of filming, George Clooney was a TV star hoping to make a splash in movies.  He worked hard to get the reluctant Russell to cast him.  Russell had originally wanted Clint Eastwood, but decided to rewrite the part for a younger actor.  He then moved on to Nick Cage, but he became unavailable.  He settled for Clooney.  Spike Jonze made his acting debut in the film. Russell’s improvisational style for making the film caused tensions with the crew.  He yelled a lot.  Clooney would stick up for the crew and this caused bitterness between the star and the director.  They came to blows at one point.  The truth was somewhere between the two men’s description of their relationship.  Russell was an asshole making an avant-garde picture and Clooney was overly protective of the crew.  The film cost about $48 million and made over $100 million.

             The movie is set in March, 1991 – “the war has just ended”.  This is a reference to the Persian Gulf War.  The movie opens with a provocative scene in which a soldier named Barlow (Mark Wahlberg) shoots an Iraqi soldier who may or may not be trying to surrender.  This was a common situation at the end of the war.  The scene shifts to the celebration back at base camp.  (Some of the soldiers are drinking out of mouthwash bottles.  During the war, because of the ban on the consumption of alcohol, soldiers had their relatives send mouthwash bottles with vodka with blue coloring.)  The movie is outstanding in showing the chaos at the end of the war.

            During the searching of Iraqi prisoners, Vig (Spike Jonze) finds a paper stuffed in a prisoner’s anus.  The paper is a map to a bunker where Saddam Hussein has stashed millions in gold bars.  When Major Gates (Clooney) gets wind of the map, he takes charge of the trio of Barlow, Vig, and Elgin (Ice Cube) and they go off in a humvee to get rich quick.  Surprise – complications arise.  These involve encounters with Iraqi soldiers and Iraqi civilians, including rebels.  

ACTING:                      A

ACTION:                      B  6/10 (quantity)

ACCURACY:               N/A

PLOT:                           A

REALISM:                   C

CINEMATOGRAPHY:      A

SCORE:                        B

 

BEST SCENE:  Barlow gets tortured

BEST QUOTE:  Conrad:  “I didn’t join the Army to pull paper out of people’s asses.”

              “Three Kings” takes a historical event (the Iraqi uprising after the Persian Gulf War) and injects a fictitious story into that chaos.  When the Persian Gulf War ended with Hussein still in power, the Bush Administration encouraged the Iraqi people to rise up.  The Shia in the South took up the call and at first were successful.  Unfortunately, the war ended with the Iraqi Republican Guard crippled, but not powerless.  It was able to carry out Hussein’s orders to ruthlessly put down the rebellion because fighting lightly armed civilians was more its skill set than combating the U.S. Army.  To make matters worse, the peace agreement did not forbid the use of helicopters.  An oversight that was to bring disaster to the insurgents.   The helicopter in the movie is a reference to how Hussein used helicopters to put down the Iraqi rebellion due to the fact that the Bush Administration did not cover non-fixed wing aircraft in its no-fly ban. 

            The movie is very entertaining.  It came out after “Saving Private Ryan” and “The Thin Red Line” and joined them in juicing up the war movie genre for modern audiences.  It is different and more unorthodox than those other films.  It is the MTV version of war.  The use of hand-held cameras and Steadicams gives it a journalistic feel. It also uses CSI-style graphics to show the effects of bullet wounds.  Barlow’s wounding is depicted from inside his body.  Russell consulted a doctor friend and asked him to describe the weirdest wound he had ever seen.  (Russell got in trouble when he joked that the shot was done using a human cadaver.)  The quartet intervenes in a wild firefight that is one of the coolest ever filmed.  The use of slo-mo and graphic visuals of bullets entering bodies is visceral.  The battle is not depicted as a fireworks extravaganza, but more like a multi-player tennis match.

            The movie is not just eye candy.  The acting is stellar from the ensemble.  Even the novice Jonze holds his own.  Clooney’s charismatic performance conclusively proves that his decision to jump from TV was a wise one.  Wahlberg cemented his status as a major star.   Most of the Iraqi parts were played by Iraqi refugees.  More importantly, the screenplay is thought-provoking.  It does not preach, but makes it clear that the period at the end of the Persian Gulf War was a messed-up situation and the U.S. should not be proud of our role in the Iraqi Insurrection.  It even includes a sympathetic Iraqi torturer (Said played by Said Taghmaoui).  This character sets the movie apart from most war on terrorism movies where the terrorists are portrayed as evil people with evil motives.  

 In some ways the movie is a biting satire of the military and the media.  It’s not laugh out loud funny, but there is tinge of humor in it.  Although the bigger picture is conveyed, the movie dwells at the human interest level.  It depicts how government decisions affect civilians.  The movie implies that the American government doesn’t care about the people in a country we fought a war in.  But the four main characters are not the stereotypical ugly Americans.  They may be greedy, but they are humane and care about the civilians caught in the cross fire.  I say cross fire even though the war was officially over, that did not mean that the Iraqi people safe, especially if they were anti-Hussein.

When you have seen as many war movies as I have, movies that are different end up standing out.  There are not very many satires that include combat.  “Three Kings” reminds me of “Kelly’s Heroes”.  George Clooney plays Clint Eastwood.  “Three Kings” has a goal beyond just making an entertaining heist set in a war.  It informs the audience of the screwed up American policy after the war ended.  Most Americans tuned out when the war ended in a crushing victory for the USA USA USA!  “Three Kings” added a post script that sobered up the patriotism.