Stephen Baldwin – Movie Musings

Passionate polemic against Vietnam, with a committed central performance – tough, angry viewing

Director: Oliver Stone

Cast: Tom Cruise (Ron Kovic), Willem Dafoe (Charlie), Kyra Sedgwick (Donna), Raymond J Barry (Eli Kovic), Jerry Levine (Steve Boyer), Frank Whaley (Timmy), Caroline Kava (Patricia Kovic), Cordelia Gonzalez (Maria Elena), Ed Lauter (Commander), John Getz (Major), Michael Wincott (Veteran), Edith Diaz (Madame), Stephen Baldwin (Billy), Bob Gunton (Doctor)

Ron Kovic and Oliver Stone shared the feelings of many of their generation: a deep and abiding feeling of betrayal about the war they were sold in Vietnam. Kovic entered Vietnam a passionate true-believer in the cause; he left a traumatised veteran, paralysed from the waist-down, facing a difficult journey of guilt and discovery that would lead him into a career of anti-war activism. Stone too left Vietnam, wounded and affected with PTSD. The two had collaborated on a screenplay of Kovic’s autobiography in the 70s, before funding fell through: Stone vowed he would make the film when he had the power: the success of Platoon and Wall Street gave him that.

It’s not a surprise, considering the understandable passion that went into it, that Born on the Fourth of July is a polemic. You can argue it’s a heavy-handed and virulent one: but then it’s hard to argue with the catastrophic impact over a decade of American foreign policy decisions had on generations across several countries. Could it have been anything else? Born can be an uncomfortable and relentless watch, and subtlety (as is often the case even in Stone’s best work) can be hard to spot. But is that a surprise when the whole film feels like a ferocious, cathartic cry of pain?

It follows a mildly fictionalised version of Kovic’s life (Kovic’s willingness to adapt his life, drew some fire at the time – particularly as he was considering a run for Congress) starting with his childhood, through his teenage enlistment, the shocking horror of Vietnam, his limited recovery in under-funded veteran hospitals, his growing discomfort with the attempt by some (including his passionately conservative mother) to celebrate sacrifices he increasingly feels were misguided and wrong, culminating in his joining the ranks of the same long-haired protestors he spoke of disparagingly earlier.

Through it all, Kovic is played with a searing intensity by Tom Cruise. Cruise was a controversial choice – seen as little more than a cocky cocktail juggling, jet piloting, superstar (despite measured, subtle turns in The Color of Money and Rain Man). It feels a lot more logical today, now that Cruise’s Day-Lewis commitment to projects is well-known. It’s a raw, open and vulnerable performance with Cruise expertly inverting the cocksure confidence of his persona (and the earlier scenes), to portray a man deeply in denial at his injuries (internal and external), with resentment, anger and self-loathing increasingly taking hold of him.

Kovic is a man who never gives up: be that a misguided (and in the end almost fatal) attempt to defy medical advice that he will never walk again, to embracing the anti-war cause with the same never-say-die attitude he signed up to the military with. What Stone and Cruise bring out, is the huge cost to Kovic of working out the fights worth having: from his student days training days on hand for a wrestling bout he loses, to is military career, to activism, it’s a long, difficult journey.

It’s a performance that understands the crippling burden of guilt. Cruise commits to Kovic’s rage, but always keeps track of the vulnerable, damaged, scared soul underneath. He never allows us to forget this is a man eating himself up, not with resentment at his injury, but guilt at his actions in Vietnam – from being part of a mission that pointlessly machine-gunned women and children, to his own accidental shooting of a fellow marine. As you would expect from Stone, Born’s view of Vietnam is bleak: pointless, disorganised missions, led from the rear by incompetent or uncaring officers, where the only victims are innocent civilians or GIs.

That’s perhaps the key about Born. Kovic is not motivated primarily by his injuries. Those are the results of the risks he chose and, to a certain degree, he accepts them. What motivates him is guilt: throughout he is haunted by the crying of the Vietnamese baby he was ordered to leave in the arms of its deceased mother while also struggling to accept his guilt at his friendly fire killing. These feelings fuel his self-loathing, and his anger rightly develops against the lies he was told that led him to commit those acts.

Stone’s film is unrelentingly critical of the mythologising of armed American intervention, and the assumption (often parroted by those who stay at home) that it can never be anything other than completely righteous. It’s a society where (as happens in the film’s opening) children play at soldiers, watch parades of veterans (the young Kovic fails to clock the flinching of these veterans – one played by the real Kovic – at rifle fire, seeing only what he wants to see) and, as young men, are sold tales of duty, sacrifice and heroism. Kovic is too young and fired-up to notice the reluctant pain of his veteran dad (a superbly low-key Raymond J Barry), clearly struggling with his own trauma.

Much as the film paints one of Kovic’s friends in a negative light – like a young Gecko he heads to college, states all this talk of Communism conquering the world is propaganda bullshit and sets up a burger chain where he brags about fleecing the customers and groping the female staff – it also can’t but admit that when it came to Vietnam, he was right. Similarly, Stone is critical of Kovic’s ambitious, apple-pie Mom (Caroline Kava, in a performance of infuriatingly smug certainty) who won’t hear a word against the war and demands achievement from her son, constantly stressing it must have been worth it.

It’s not a surprise one of Born’s most cathartic moment is when Kovic – Cruise’s performance hitting new heights of unleashed resentment – rails late-at-night at his Mom, calling out her upbringing of unquestioning patriotism and saintly conformity as nothing but an ocean of bullshit. It’s an outpouring that has been welling up since his return, looking for the right direction: snapping at protestors, doctors, his younger brother who dares to oppose the War. Born is about a man coming to terms with why he is so angry and finding the appropriate target: and it becomes the system that sent him on this journey, starting with his mother and onto his own government.

This would be the government that provides shabby hospitals, full of broken-down equipment, whacked out attendants and overworked, underqualified doctors. Stone’s camera pans along wards piled with rubbish and rats. The conditions here are, in many ways, worse than the Mexican villa where Kovic finds himself struggling to re-adjust, surrounded by other paralysed veterans (among them Willem Dafoe, as a seemingly mentor-like figure with uncurdled rage just below the surface). Stone’s film never once loses its righteous fury at how a generation was let down by its leaders on every level.

So it’s not surprising Born is a fiercely polemic work. And, yes, that does sometimes reduce its interest and make it an unrelentingly grim watch (Stone isn’t interested in putting any other side of the argument in here). But it’s extremely well made (Robert Richardson’s excellent photography uses tints of red, white and blue at key points to brilliantly stress mood) and you can feel the heart Stone (who won a second directing Oscar for this) put into it. Its impact comes down to how much you engage with the passionate, furious argument its making: connect with it and it’s a very powerful film.

The immortal gang in legendary twist thriller The Usual Suspects

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: Stephen Baldwin (Michael McManus), Gabriel Byrne (Dean Keaton), Benicio del Toro (Fred Fenster), Kevin Pollak (Todd Hockney), Kevin Spacey (Roger “Verbal” Kint), Chazz Palminteri (Agent Dave Kujan), Pete Postlethwaite (Kobayashi), Suzy Amis (Edey Finneran), Giancarlo Esposito (Jack Baer), Dan Hedaya (Sergeant Jeff Rabin)

SPOILERS: If you have been living in a cave since 1995, don’t read on as I discuss the twist at great length…

“Convince me”. That’s what Customs Agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) says as he begins his interrogation of limping, low-time crook “Verbal” Kint (Kevin Spacey). That’s certainly what Kint does – and it’s what the whole film is aiming to do in this, the most famous confidence trick in movies. The Usual Suspects is one of those once-in-a-blue-moon films where everything comes together perfectly. It’s also a sleight-of-hand movie that remains hugely engaging and entertaining even when (as surely most people now do!) you know exactly what the magician has up his sleeve. Its solid gold entertainment factor even survives today, despite the slightly queasy presence of both Kevin Spacey and Bryan Singer in its credits.

Told in flashback, the film follows the coming together of a bunch of regular criminals, pulled in for a line-up and deciding to team up. Along with Verbal, the others include McManus (Stephen Baldwin), Fenster (Benecio del Toro), Hockney (Kevin Pollak) and ex-cop turned criminal Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne). After a successful series of heists, the gang are conscripted by suspicious lawyer Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite) to take on a dangerous hijacking job for shadowy – possibly legendary – master criminal Keyser Soze, the bogeyman of the criminal classes. We know the job will go wrong – after all Verbal is banged up telling the whole story, the only survivor of the job – but how? And who is the shadowy Soze – or is he even real at all?

The Usual Suspects takes what you know about movies and then works double time to use it against you. With a structure inspired by classic noir crime films from the 1940s – the whole operation has a touch of The Asphalt Jungle while the interrogation has more than a hint of Double Indemnity – mixed in with a lot of Rashomon, it’s a movie that has you primed so much for a reveal and a twist that it skilfully misdirects you into expecting the wrong thing. Because how could you guess that perhaps the whole movie is a spun-out-of-the-moment invention by Verbal, and that possibly almost nothing we see during the course of its run time even happened.

But how can we guess? From the very first scenes with Kujan and Verbal, Kujan is shot dominating the frame, always taller, always filling the screen. Verbal is sitting, meek, trapped by the frame, the camera frequently looking down at him. Every shot subliminally tells us that he is weak. The story has to be dragged out of him, with the investigation outside of the room forcing Verbal to expand on issues he doesn’t want to touch on. Like Kujan we invest in what we are finding out, because it looks like Verbal doesn’t want to tell it to us. That’s how they get you.

Because Verbal, in his story, is sprinkling in just the twist that Dave (and the audience) is probably expecting – that Gabriel Byrne’s Dean Keaton, the guy who claimed to have gone good, who just wanted out, was bad the whole time and was the criminal mastermind this whole time. Christopher McQuarrie’s ingenious script primes us for this: Dave Kujan is casting doubt on Keaton’s “death” right from the start, and as the audience surrogate figure we want to be as smart as he is. So what does it matter that we ”see” Keaton shot in the opening sequence of the film? Surely that was an illusion, and we’re as clever as Kujan in seeing through it.

The film even gives us a brilliantly assembled “reveal” series of edited flashbacks, in which every small moment and hint that has existed in the film is replayed for us (John Ottman’s editing is flawless here – and he should also have credit for composing the film’s hauntingly classical score) to convince us, beyond a shadow of a doubt that, yup, poor simple Verbal was taken in all the time by dastardly Keaton, the guy who looks like a film star. Only of course it’s bollocks. That charred corpse that Singer jump cuts to at the start of the film as police investigate the boat massacre is indeed Keaton. And the clever twist we thought we were working out, turns out to be a mass distraction laid out for us by Verbal and the film.

So we get a second brilliantly edited reveal sequence as it hits Kujan while he studies that most famous notice board in film, that everything he thought he had worked out had been spun out of hints and clues off the board – from asides and anecdotes to entire locations and characters. And Kevin Spacey limps and then walks away, shrugging off the skin of timid, weak Verbal to transform into the chillingly amoral Soze. It’s a trick that worked especially well when Spacey was an almost unknown actor at the time (today it’s less of a surprise to find out that Spacey could be a creep). There is possibly no better reveal in Hollywood.

But the film continues to entertain even when you know it because Singer’s film is stuffed with richly layered characters, scintillating scenes and some rich and spicy dialogue from McQuarrie. It’s a brilliant combination and provides every scene with a clear and electric dynamism that makes it impossible to tear your eyes away. There are some truly striking scenes – not least the iconic line-up scene – and the film carries an improvisational energy (that line-up scene is a magic use of outtakes, as the actors couldn’t keep a straight face during the sequence).

Part of the magic of it comes from the brilliant clash of a group of vastly different actors bouncing off each other: the self-consciously method Baldwin, the edgy energy of Pollack, the chilly technique of Spacey and the classically trained professionalism of Byrne, who pulls off with aplomb a difficult job of playing a decoy protagonist and antagonist in one. And that’s not mentioning the wild card of Del Toro who, working out his character was a one-note plot device, throws in an eccentric chic and impenetrable mumbling accent that is part affectation (the sort of thing that made the actor more trying later in his career) and part jaw-dropping show of confidence. And backing them up is a collection of actors as eccentric as Palminteri channelling Law and Order with a smile and Postlethwaite as a sinister limey lawyer with an accent that sounds like it hails from the Raj.

Singer’s direction is flawlessly confident, creating a rich tapestry that you could lazily call Tarantinoesque, but actually reminds you of John Huston in its carefully framed mise-en-scene. It’s a very classical movie in its way, that loves clever wipes, slow build ups, brilliantly edited and surprisingly low key in much of its framing and shooting. Everything is perfectly placed to help build up the illusion. Singer never touched these heights of confidence and control again. It’s also superbly edited throughout by John Ottman, each beat landing perfectly, each transition perfectly judged. It wouldn’t seem out of pace to see Cagney playing Kint (with Bogart surely as Keaton).

The devilish trickiness of the plot is kept largely under wraps until late on – Soze isn’t even mentioned until nearly halfway through the film – and the film’s confident misdirection suggests this might just be the gang aiming too high and getting burned rather than a shadowy mastermind manipulating it all. It’s a brilliantly judged change of pace, and all part of the impish delight of the film. It’s a clever game, but has more than enough force and invention in its story telling to keep you gripped time and time again. McQuarrie and Spacey won Oscars – and the film hinges so much on Spacey’s ability to both tell an anecdote and also not push his acting lame – and the film lives on forever in the memory as one of the finest twists. But it does so because the twist grows so organically from the film, and the film’s delight in tricking you is completely infectious.