Born on the Fourth of July

Tom Cruise, hot off his success in the previous year's Rain Man, turns in another excellent dramatic performance in Oliver Stone's biopic of Ron Kovic. The movie unfolds over a 20-year period, detailing Kovic's childhood, his Vietnam military service, which left him paralyzed, and his transition into an anti-war activist. Stone, one of the least subtle filmmakers in the history of the medium, is able to find a bit more depth and nuance in telling Kovic's story than he achieved in his semi-autobiographical Vietnam War drama Platoon (1986), but this is still a very heavy-handed picture. The opening scenes of Kovic's youth are all sweeping crane shots and sweeping John Williams cues. I suppose it captures something truthful about America in the 1950s and '60s, or at least what we like to think of as America in the 1950s and '60s, but it's all laid on very thick.

Stone is much better when the action switches to Vietnam, where its depictions of combat, the fog of war, and the horrendous conditions at military hospitals are brief but harrowing. These sequences and the apt depiction of '60s-era America that Kovic returned to provide enough context for us to understand how this ultra-patriotic kid could become so disillusioned about the country that sent him to fight. And Cruise gives a relentless, deeply affecting performance in the lead role. Even those who can't stand the cocky, almost laughably driven style of acting Cruise brings to all his roles have to acknowledge how good he can be when playing within his wheelhouse, such as in his previous pictures Taps (1981), All the Right Moves (1983), and Risky Business (1983). But in Born on the Fourth of July, Cruise succeeds in playing outside of his comfort zone, taking real chances and exploring a wider range of emotions than he'd called on before. It's a performance that feels less impressive decades later, when we've seen this actor do far more intricate work, but in the late '80s, it was a surprise to discover how much range he had.

Stone and Kovic were reluctant to consider Cruise for this film. Both hated Top Gun, the 1986 movie that made the young actor a mega star and that Stone called a fascist piece of military recruitment propaganda. But Stone was intrigued by the idea of casting this golden boy, who seemed to have it all, in a story about a promising kid whose body and mind are torn up and permanently damaged by wartime experience. Born on the Fourth of July was largely embraced by critics and audiences, sweeping the Golden Globes and scoring Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, and Best Original Score (Stone won his second Oscar for directing while David Brenner, and Joe Hutshing won Oscars for editing). But this was also the point when many in Hollywood and Washington stopped praising everything Stone made and began to question his talent and motivations. Many film writers found the film facile and manipulative—valid critiques for all of Stone's prior work, especially the laughably awful Wall Street (1987)—and many right-wing politicians like Pat Buchanan called Stone out for deviating from Kovic's book to paint him as "some kind of angel." Kovic considered a run for Congress fueled by all the attention he got as a result of the film, but ultimately decided against it.