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Francis Ford Coppola's jungle gambit, closer to Carroll than to Conrad. "I think the light and space of Vietnam really put the zap on his head." Lawrence of Arabia and Aguirre, the Wrath of God are the mainstays, lysergic juxtapositions are prevalent—napalm explosions set to Jim Morrison's voluptuous moan, helicopter blades in the upside-down mind. A classified mission gets the torpid Army captain (Martin Sheen) out of his Saigon purgatory and into the Mekong hell, up the river to "terminate" the rogue colonel (Marlon Brando). The burnout after the renegade, it makes as much sense as anything else in war, "charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500." Cajun chef (Frederic Forrest) and beach bum (Sam Bottoms) and teen gunner (Laurence Fishburne) in the crew, "rock 'n' rollers with one foot in their graves." The Air Cavalry raid on the Vietnamese village turns Wagner's Valkyries into fire-breathing locusts, its appalling exhilaration shows John Milius' hand in the screenplay, Robert Duvall's brilliant rendition of a surfboard-mad Custer is out of Dr. Strangelove. "The asshole of the world," thick green and Agent Orange, "better than Disneyland." New Hollywood's grand folly, the legendary ordeals and oneiric death drift of a wunderkind chasing his own mania. (Not for nothing does Coppola pop up as a documentarian screaming at the soldiers to not look at the camera.) Set-piece after phantasmagoric set-piece, a spectral circus of Playboy bunnies and putrefying colonialists, "sure enough a bizarre sight in the middle of this shit." Brando's casting is the thematic culmination of a lineage of films (Mutiny on the Bounty, The Ugly American, Burn!), the monumental dome camouflaged by shadows rumbles in a marathon of mystification. ("A poet warrior in the classical sense," exults Dennis Hopper's gonzo journalist, the brass is more succinct, "unsound.") Primordial slime and sacrificial bull, "Almighty" on the radio goes unanswered. "Someday this war's gonna end," cf. Malick's The Thin Red Line. Cinematography by Vittorio Storaro. With Albert Hall, Harrison Ford, G.D. Spradlin, Jerry Ziesmer, Scott Glenn, and Colleen Camp.
--- Fernando F. Croce |