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Randall Wallace Rallies to Defend the Grotesqueness
of His Films By Bastardizing the True Events of One of America's
Lowest Hours
My favorite episode of "The Simpsons" is the one
in which Mel Gibson remakes Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
The test screening is in Springfield, and, of course, Homer
is the only one who doesn't like it because there's too much
talking and not enough killing. Mel agrees with Homer and
decides to reshoot the ending. Instead of intoning Jimmy Stewart's
famous speech, Mel turns the ending of Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington into the dining hall scene in The Odyssey:
Mr. Smith throws an American flag through Senator Paine's
chest, he falls over, and the flag stands upright, waving
patriotically. All sorts of other gruesome things happen,
obviously an ironic comment on Braveheart, and it ends
with kids running up and hugging bloody Mel. Moe, Marge, and
the rest of Springfield hate it, which means that the studio
execs hate it, so they chase Mel and Homer, who escape on
the back of the big buggy from Mad Max. Mel wants to
surrender to the studios and cut back the violence, but Homer
stands his ground: "Mel, did Braveheart run away? Did
Payback run away?"
In the end, Mel decides that there's too much violence in
the movies. Which means that Randall Wallace and the rest
of the Braveheart crew offered him a lot of money for
We Were Soldiers, Black Hawk Down with a
Pearl Harbor sensibility. According to Randall Wallace's
official website, the story is as follows: "On November
14, 1965, in the Ia Drang Valley of Vietnam, in a small clearing
called Landing Zone X-Ray, Lt. Col. Hal Moore and 400 young
fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons—all troopers from the
U.S. 7th “Air” Cavalry—were surrounded by 2,000 enemy soldiers.
The ensuing battle was one of the most savage in U.S. history.
We Were Soldiers is a tribute to the nobility of those
men under fire, their common acts of uncommon valor, and their
loyalty to and love for one another." Fair enough. Ostensibly,
Mel plays Hal Moore, the colonel in charge of this ragtag
bunch; really, though, Mel is playing Mel Gibson, the same
stern-faced, grief-in-his-eyes war hero he has spent a career
perfecting. His sidekick is Sam Elliot, who responds to questions
like "How's the weather?" with "What are you?
The fucking weatherman?" It's the most fun I've seen
him have since The Big Lebowski; he's the Comic Relief
Heavy, which somewhat compromises the early tone of the film.
We meet the men with Sam and Mel, but they act like they're
conducting AAU basketball tryouts. Wallace skitters close
to Bruckheimer buffoonery: "We will ride into battle,
and this...will be our horse!" is as embarrassing in
the film as it is in the commercials.
The soldiers themselves are a parade of one-note cherubs
common to the Bruckheimer films with which Wallace is now
intimate. Wallace goes after some religious ideas with the
introduction of Chris Klein, the white angel who's spent the
last few years with his wife building orphanages. After she
gives birth, Klein heads to church to pray. Mel shows up,
and a potentially interesting dialogue about war, religion,
and duty turns into an obvious joke about asking God to help
us "blow the enemy to Hell." This is Wallace's forté:
running away from potentially meaningful ideas out of either
1) Fear of drawing his characters into moral conflict, or
2) Fear that his weakness as a writer will be further exposed.
My guess is #2.
Wallace does it again when we meet the rest of the boys.
He takes special care to point out that the men are a huddled
mass of America's melting pot. Mel even tells us this in the
big speech: We've got an Indian, a Texan, an Asian, a Hispanic,
and an African-American. As with his absurd portrayal of Dorie
Miller, Cuba Gooding, Jr.'s character in Pearl Harbor,
Wallace wants desperately to be seen as embracing noble sensibilities
of race. But rather than explore the conflict of minorities
fighting a war for a country that hates them, he just throws
the idea out there to look like he's making a statement—when
he's really just purging his own White Man's Guilt. For example,
the black guy is important enough to the story to have his
spouse in the Wives' Club, and there's a joke in the Wives'
Club meeting about the laundromat's sign reading, "Whites
Only." The Black Wife is asked why her man fights for
a country that discriminates against them, and she replies,
"I know why he does, and that's good enough for me."
Even Mel gives it a shot later, but he just ends up sounding
like Momma Gump explaining to Forest that he's normal.
Next, there's the bittersweet send-off party in which soldiers
do what they've done best since Top Gun: Sing off-key
sixties love songs. Mel's wife is played by Madeleine Stowe,
who looks as if Angelina Jolie's lips have been planted on
Cher's body. Mel leaves the party for a bit to discuss strategy
with Sam. The battle will be unwinnable, and Mel wonders what
Custer must have felt like. Mel's platoon is even given
Custer's old cavalry number. Uh oh. This can't be good.
It's also not a good sign when Greg Kinnear figures to be
the pivotal man in your battalion, but he's the chopper pilot
that shuttles in and out of the warzone. Anyway, let's just
get to the battle. Wallace's battle scenes don't navigate
the logistical difficulties the men face, and they're so filled
with clichés that it's difficult to take seriously.
Single sneak-attack bullets are countered by angry waves of
bullets. The movie gains a least a half and hour from slow-mo
alone. Mel and Sam yell at the boys to keep their heads down,
yet they walk around firing single-shot pistols at Vietnamese
machine gunners from point-blank range. Mel vows to be the
"first one on the field of battle" (we get a slow-mo
shot showing his foot touching first) and "the last one
off." This is contrasted with the enemy's commander,
who spends the entire battle holed up in a cave drawing arrows
on a topographic map. The idea is that hands-on cowboy bravado
trumps stuffy academics. Be not mistaken, one of the first
scenes is Mel hauling heavy books into his new home, but he's
no "academic pussy." Mel has enough respect for
the protocol of battle that he takes prisoners and piles the
enemy's dead after a machine gun slaughter, whereas the barbaric
Vietnamese slaughter everyone they capture and leave them
to rot. Again, Wallace is being didactic and ignores the obvious
moral issues. How can we ask the audience to love Mel if he's
not an outright hero? Randall Wallace is not Terrence Malick.
This movie is not about morality; it's about the beads of
sweat on Mel's face, which Wallace focuses in on every ten
minutes or so. It's about being a soldier, but Wallace is
too busy sentimentalizing the wives and the tragic deaths
to accomplish the Roman poetry of Ridley Scott, who took a
similar story in Black Hawk Down and created an unflinching,
unsentimental portrait of soldiering.
Which is not to say that Wallace doesn't create some interesting
visuals. Perhaps his best is a Vietnamese-American soldier
caught in a blaze of friendly fire. The friendly fire burns
precisely half his face, and he is carried away on the chopper
looking like William Wallace, except the white and blue warpaint
is replaced by a human face charred by napalm. Because of
scenes like this, I was willing to cut this movie a break—until
Barry Pepper's Joe Galloway showed up. In real life, Galloway
is a UP reporter who engaged in the battle and helped Moore
author the book twenty-five years later. Joe jumps on a crowded
chopper to head to the front lines. He ends up dropping his
camera and picking up a gun (you know, just like when Cuba
emerges from the mess hall to pound out some rounds on the
machine gun). Later, he takes intimate pictures of all the
tragedy, and, of all people, Mel tells him, "It's important
that you tell the story of what went on here." When the
rest of the reporters show up (I'm a bit surprised Al Gore
was not among them), they are drawn as vultures, and Wallace
places them behind a tattered American flag. In the book,
Hal Moore uses the battle to discuss principles of leadership,
with Galloway to lend authenticity, another account of the
happenings. In the film, however, the subtext is that Galloway
character is a stand-in for the film itself; its documentation
of the events of war is IMPORTANT. It's an attempt to justify
the grotesque violence Wallace employs in all his films, a
justification of his method. Essentially, he's saying, "I'm
not just titillating the audience; I'm TELLING THE STORY!"
Films that shy away from the level of violence Wallace employs
are equated with the vulturistic media, while the heroic journalist
who engages in the battle is equated with Braveheart and
We Were Soldiers. It's a self-reflexive, self-important
gesture that undermines not only the integrity of the film,
but Randall Wallace's integrity as a storyteller.
The difference between We Were Soldiers and Black
Hawk Down is that the former is hero worship; it doesn't
show us the sacrifices of men for each other without undermining
its integrity by coating it with sentimentalism. The battle
narrative is mostly a series of bullets through the head and
spurts of blood, the audience comforted by the fact that Sam
and Mel are virtually bulletproof, able to supernaturally
navigate the struggle out of sheer will. We Were Soldiers
makes sense of how blood splatters when a bullet enters the
cranium, but it doesn't make sense of the code of soldiering
that both leads to and saves men from that moment. Black
Hawk Down takes a similar story integrates the idea of
"Leave No Man Behind" into the narrative structure
of the battle itself. Ridley Scott and Ken Nolan arrange the
narrative to show men rescuing each other in reflex gestures,
as when the glass of a windshield blinds a humvee driver,
who keeps his foot on the gas while his partner steers. Randall
Wallace tells us about it by having Mel jog out and find the
last two bodies after titillating us with one last heroic
slaughter. This is not to say that Black Hawk Down
isn't violent—it's perhaps the most violent film of 2001—but
Ridley Scott expresses the dirty realism of war, creating
a clear narrative from a messy situation, and like the ancient
war verses, takes us through the rituals of war: preparation,
accident, struggle, loss, sacrifice, redemption, and all the
rest. We Were Soldiers shows us how disgusting it is
to be shot in the neck, where Black Hawk Down labors
to show us how a battle plan can unravel into chaos, with
men relying on the covenant of soldiering to rescue them from
Hell. We Were Soldiers begs for tears by showing a
lot of slow-motion deaths, so contrived that every death is
poignantly underscored. Black Hawk Down is about the
dirt kicked up by rocket launchers and real-time discoveries
of death. We Were Soldiers is Black Hawk Down turned
into self-congratulation—it's the storytelling equivalent
of Mel Gibson's Mr. Smith shooting an American flag through
Claude Rains' chest.
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