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Buffalo Soldiers doesn’t waste time acknowledging its antecedents in the anti-heroic military genre. In the opening shot, Specialist Ray Elwood (Joaquin Phoenix) has a recurring nightmare of being dropped from the bomb bay of an airplane, like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove. Moments later, the screen fills with a huge blazon of the Stars and Stripes that looks like the backdrop of the "making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country" speech in the opening scene of Patton. Only, the flag is on the ground and shot from above, and a formation of troops marches over its painted face. Before the film is over, M*A*S*H, Catch-22 and Kelly’s Heroes are also cited. But a lot has changed since the ’60s and ’70s, when those movies were made, including how movies are made and for whom. And far from seeming derivative and dated, Soldiers seems downright revolutionary. It isn’t. An adaptation by Australian director Gregor Jordan of the cultish Robert O’Connor novel, it’s a brisk, crisply executed, sometimes visually striking black comedy that’s also glib at times and a little smug. But it draws enough on its predecessors’ subversive spirit and measured anarchy to offend and exhilarate. Another film to throw into the mix of influences is From Here to Eternity, especially in terms of plot and tone — the tone more the sardonic nihilism of the James Jones’s original than that of the sanitized Hollywood classic. And the acting isn’t bad. In his best performance to date, Joaquin Phoenix brings a snide insouciance and a strange innocence to the Burt Lancaster–ish role of Elwood, the cynical company clerk of the non-fighting 317th, a supply unit somewhere near the East-West German border. That border is about to dissolve, as this is 1989, but despite Jordan’s efforts to jazz up the film with news footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall ("Where is the Berlin Wall?" asks one stoned soldier), the end of the Cold War is largely irrelevant to Buffalo Soldiers. As Elwood puts it in his voiceover introduction, "War is hell. But peace is fucking boring." And that was as true in 2001 (when the film was made, pre–September 11) as it was in 1989. Diversion comes in the form of drugs, random violence (often racial — the MPs are glorified gangstas), and criminal entrepreneurship. Elwood, a convicted petty crook who chose serving time over doing time, excels at the art of the deal, if not at the art of war. It’s to Phoenix’s credit that he can make his character endearing in a era when Sergeant Bilko would probably be denounced as un-American. Audiences may well wink at Elwood’s charming shamelessness in selling 500 gallons of Mop ’n’ Glo to the black market. They’re likely to balk, however, when he starts swapping Stinger missiles for the kilos of Turkish opium that his crew will boil down to heroin and sell to their grateful comrades on the base. What makes Elwood human and sympathetic, apart from his status as an existential everyman making do in a world of utter amorality and sinister hypocrisy, is his relationships. His CO, Colonel Wallace Berman (Ed Harris), trusts him implicitly and would probably confide in him even if he knew Elwood was screwing his wife (Elizabeth McGovern), à la From Here to Eternity. What with all the hubbub over the film, few are apt to note the hilarious, mordant subtlety of the scenes between Harris and Phoenix, particularly one heartbreaking moment in which Berman recalls shaking President Kennedy’s hand. So much for sentiment. For romance, there’s Robyn Lee (Anna Paquin), daughter of Elwood’s nemesis, Sergeant Robert E. Lee (Scott Glenn, joyously evil). Newly assigned to the base, Sergeant Lee is determined to clean up the corruption through methods he employed in special operations during the Vietnam War. Elwood thinks it would be an interesting twist to the game if he screwed around with Lee’s daughter. Then he falls in love, and his nightmare about falling proves prophetic. Yes, the symbolism is a little facile. Also, the references to Nietzsche thud gratuitously, and whenever the narrative gets bogged down, a fortuitous explosion must be contrived to give it a nudge. But far from lacking respect for the military, Buffalo Soldiers pays Americans in uniform the compliment of confronting uncomfortable truths, and it gives audiences a chance to see all that they can see. |
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Issue Date: August 8 - August 14, 2003 Back to the Movies table of contents |
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