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Elaine Liner is Caller-Times' media critic. Her columns are published Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. She has been known to occasionally gossip with her readers in the Elaine Liner Forum. Elaine can be reached at linere@caller.com Friday, November 12, 1999 'Full Metal Jacket'Movie one of the best about Vietnam War
One of the three best movies about the Vietnam War began as a description in a gun catalogue. Stanley Kubrick saw the phrase "full metal jacket" and considered it, according to one of the late director's biographers, "beautiful and tough, and kind of poetic." Kubrick already owned the rights to a novel about the war called "The Short-Timers" and handed it off to screenwriter Michael Herr for adaptation. Five years later, they had "Full Metal Jacket," filmed over a year and released in 1987. Alongside Oliver Stone's "Platoon" and Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," Kubrick's is clearly the most enigmatic of the great Vietnam dramas. The Stone film starring Charlie Sheen showed Vietnam as it really happened (it was based on Stone's own experiences there). Coppola's earlier, troubled masterpiece, starring Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Marlon Brando and Dennis Hopper, was a loose retelling of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." It saw Vietnam as an epic myth, complete with Wagnerian soundtrack. "Full Metal Jacket" is really two films in one, exploring two recurring Kubrick themes: dehumanization and what it takes to unleash a man's killer instinct. Setting it against the Vietnam War seems merely a convenient device. It could have taken place during WW I or II or even Korea. It's a two-act movie (116 minutes) with a great first act, so great that the first is a perfect movie unto itself. In that hour we meet Pvt. Joker (Matthew Modine), a draftee who quickly becomes a leader among his fellow Marines in boot camp on Parris Island (recreated, along with the Vietnam scenes, on sets in the English countryside). Joker is put in charge of the hopelessly stupid, babyfat-bound Pvt. Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio) by the tyrannical drill instructor, Sgt. Hartman (the phenomenal R. Lee Ermey). Hartman is the central figure of the training sequences and production notes say Ermey, a former Parris Island DI originally hired to be a technical consultant on the film, ad-libbed many of the insults barked at the terrified trainees. "You're so ugly you could be a modern art masterpiece!" he snarls. Gradually, Joker and Pyle bond as they learn to put on their war faces and respect both their rifles and their guns (the film explains the difference). Then Hartman pushes too far and Pyle snaps in a scene that's brilliant and shocking - and a shot-by-shot steal from a Japanese film called "The Human Condition," right down to Kubrick's use of two-tone music (which he used again in his final film, "Eyes Wide Shut"). Act two, "Jacket" takes Joker "in country" and into the Tet Offensive. These sequences are weak follow-ups to the stronger first act. My advice: rewind and watch the first hour again. "Full Metal Jacket" is rated R for language and intense violence. Media critic Elaine Liner can be reached at 886-3688 or by e-mail at linere@caller.com.
© 1999 Corpus Christi Caller Times, a Scripps Howard newspaper. All rights reserved. |
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