Casualties of War

The acclaimed Alfred Hitchcock impersonator Brian De Palma took a brief but interesting detour into mainstream Hollywood filmmaking in the mid-to-late '80s. Teaming up with uber-producer Art Linson (Car Wash, Melvin and Howard, Fast Times at Ridgemont High) he made the highly commercial gangster picture The Untouchables in 1987. That slick production boasted an exciting cast—including the judicious use of Robert De Niro as a sinister Al Capone and Sean Connery in the hammy Irish mentor role that won the great star a career-capper Oscar—and a script by acclaimed playwright and screenwriter David Mamet. De Palma and Linson quickly re-teamed for this darker film based on events that occurred during the Vietnam War, in which a squad of American soldiers kidnapped a Vietnamese woman from her village, subsequently raping and murdering her.

Employing another high profile playwright, David Rabe (In the Boom Boom Room, Streamers, Hurlyburly), to adapt Daniel Lang's 1969 New Yorker article that exposed this wartime atrocity, Casualties of War was a much tougher sell to the movie-going public, and much of it doesn't work. Still, in many ways, this is the most fascinating De Palma picture in that the shallow auteur attempts to put all of his virtuosic cinematic bravado to an actual use beyond just showing off how much fun it is to make movies. Most of De Palma's movies are fun, but they're rarely about anything. Carrie, Blow Out, and Body Double are the movies this director will be remembered for, and for good reason. He's the ultimate style over substance guy, but that approach almost serves Casualties of War well. This is the rare De Palma movie with a compelling narrative that places it's central character into a believable moral dilemma with life and death stakes.

Casualties of War is an immersive big-screen picture with the intimacy and power of a great stage play. Each character resonates as a unique individual with their own complex set of strengths, flaws, and motivations. Watching this small drama play out conveys more about the criminal folly of America's involvement in political wars than many of the grander large-scale Vietnam films of the decade. Casualties of War works far better than Oliver Stones pretentious Platoon. Rather than simplistic Christ metaphors and monotonous diary readings, De Palma's film features much of the over-the-top excess of Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now reigned in by the meticulousness of an exacting aesthetic perfectionist. These opposing dynamics render the film less a metaphor for the actual Vietnam War and more one for how our country has attempted to rewrite the messy history of that conflict.

The film also has the distinction of being the movie in which Michael J. Fox delivers a nuanced performance while Sean Penn crosses over into a scenery-chewing caricature. Penn, as always, buries himself in his part, transforming his diminutive frame into the larger-than-life, brutal Sergeant Tony Meserve. Fox is saddled with the much more difficult, far less showy, role of the mild-mannered grunt Private Max Eriksson, who objects to his vengeful squad leader's contemptuous and highly illegal orders to kidnap the young Vietnamese woman. Fox simultaneously plays confusion, fear, uncertainty, and anger all within the confines of his trademark “lovable little guy” screen persona. The director and producer clearly cast Fox for a reason, relying on his established persona to do a lot of the work for them. But Fox elevates the film beyond this lazy calculation. The movie also boasts a terrific supporting cast featuring John Leguizamo, Don Patrick Harvey, Ving Rhames, Dale Dye, Wendell Pierce, Sam Robards, and John C. Reilly in his first film role.

Rabe, who served as a medic in Vietnam and wrote many plays about his experience as an Army draftee (including the Tony Award-winners Sticks and Bones and The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel) disassociated himself from the finished picture, but he is surely responsible for the narrative depth that remains undernieth the excesses of De Palma's camera and Penn's performance. I can't call Casualties of War a great film. but it's one of the most unique entires in the trend of '80s Vietnam pictures, and one of the most compelling films by it's director.