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The nightmare of war scarcely ends with death, the "real miracle" brings it home for an alarming analysis. Stygian jungles illuminated by explosions, the young soldier who takes a bullet (Richard Backus) trapped in a grainy freeze-frame under the credits, a ghastly tale of limbo. Back in Florida his family receives the news, Mom (Lynn Carlin) refuses to believe it and wills her son home, or rather the glum ghoul who was once her son. Materializing with ashen skin wrapped in military greens, he takes to the rocking chair in his darkened bedroom, no pulse and no heartbeat. "Why is he so different?" cries Dad (John Marley) even before the boy strangles the dog and attempts to regenerate himself with blood. "I died for you, Doc. Why shouldn't you return the favor?" Monstrous grief and its even more monstrous denial, the heavy toll of Vietnam elucidated by way of Jacobs (The Monkey's Paw) and Eliot ("Stetson!"). Spirals of violence abroad and within (the tradition at the dinner table is one of carving), Bob Clark's blunt camera zooms out the window from the undead vet's empty guffaw and then zooms into his twitchy grimace as the older generation recalls patriotic duties. A surprising intersection with Cassavetes' Faces, gloves and shades to veil the decay of combat fatigue, a film of terrible sadness and pain. Slaughter at the drive-in for the end of innocence (cf. Bogdanovich's Targets), sometimes trauma is papered over and at others it spurts from your forehead. Maternal hysteria "to fill with joy the warrior's heart," as the song goes, all he wants is the relief of a graveyard. "The Tunnel" sequence from Kurosawa's Dreams evinces an echo. With Anya Ormsby, Henderson Forsythe, and Jane Daly.
--- Fernando F. Croce |