Membering and Remembering on Memorial Day (special guest star: Marvin Gardens)

Only a series of unremarkable but serendipitous reminders kept me conscious that yesterday was Memorial Day. Normally, I would have known only by the day off I'd be pleasantly surprised to get, but I left my job a few weeks ago in a blaze of scene, and beyond that the day clocks as many brain hours as Arbor Day (though more than Earth Day, in my defense).

This year marks the first I've made a point to remember on Memorial Day, and it's telling my big behavior change was in the type of movie I rented. I've had in mind to watch Zardoz, the 1974 Sean Connery catastrophe which started out as Hollywood's first attempt to adapt Lord of the Rings, and come up w/ a Hollywood Bizarro Butchery formula for making intriguingly weird cult classics. If Lord of the Rings contains a floating stone idol head that vomits machine guns by the time it makes it to the screen, what giggle-and-hand-clappingly great zany might we wring from, say, King Lear, or the Book of Ezekiel?

But I'd been thinking about MD and the lack of rememberence thereon for a few days by then, so that little ember of responsibility was growing just a bit brighter than usual. I trolled the aisles for awhile. Lingered over Saving Private Ryan, which I've never seen (or Lion King or Braveheart, if you need yet another reason to not respect me), but I don't trust Spielberg after Munich. Finally lucked upon We Were Soldiers, and the three of you reading this know an Insta recommendation is all the good word I need.

The native reviewer on amazon.com lauds the film as paying "tribute to brave men while avoiding the pitfalls of propaganda", but the reviewer quoted below it, the New Yorker's David Denby, can't quite put up with a Vietnam movie that, as IP puts it, doesn't remake Kafka:

A bloody piece of hero worship devoted to an ideal commander-Lieutenant Colonel Harold Moore (Mel Gibson)-and to fighting and dying in the right way. The training is bruising, the leadership inspired, the wives as supportive as deeply rooted oaks. In 1965, early in the war in Vietnam, Moore leads units of the Army's Seventh Cavalry against a much larger North Vietnamese force. Mel Gibson is leathery but quick and alert, his eyes darting this way and that. When he runs around from one part of the perimeter to another, his M-16 blazing, the movie is exciting in a rudimentary, gung-ho way. The writer-director Randall Wallace stages much of the combat at very close range, with masses of North Vietnamese infantry hurling themselves against American riflemen. Recapitulating the many pictures made in the forties and fifties which portrayed the Americans as good and simple people fighting for a just cause, Wallace and Gibson have taken Vietnam out of history-essentially, they have assimilated it into the Second World War. (emphasis added)

I've heard two stories about this film, and Denby's take is in the minority. The other perspective I get mostly from the DVD itself, but also from amazon's first customer review; namely, that of all Vietnam flicks, this is the one that gets right what it was like, and what sort of men and families were involved.

And the film's story is almost objectionably simple: Earnest young men in the just-barely-pre-radicalized '60s, led by an earnest man twice their age and a course-but-sincere gentleman another decade older get called to war, do their damndest to keep each other alive, while the wives they left home do their best to support each other. No innovative plot, no clever storytelling. There's grit, but the film doesn't glory in how unafraid of grit it is. All it has to say about Vietnam is how honorable everyone fighting was (including respect for the North Vietnamese so genuine I teared up [not that that was the only time my face came down with bitch-leak]).

What I'm getting at is this. I'm only recently learning new reasons to appreciate, to be impressed by movies. The King of Marvin Gardens, for example, I would have dismissed even a few months ago as meager. It's got the "here's how awkward and uncinematic real life really is" voice down pat, but nowhere near as much to say about that awkwardness as that calamitous symphony of human nuance, Glengarry Glen Ross, a contrast that would have earned Marvin Gardens demerits in my eyes then. Also, in my old eyes, the story doesn't really go anywhere. Yes, sad things happen in real life and exploits don't always end in victory. So what? Is that really worth making a thousand movies about? And why do they all seem like they think they're the first?

BUT, watching movies to get perspective on the Boomer Bible has opened my whole face. For all its trappings of a bleak 70s movie that, in standing in contrast to the type of movie and storytelling that came before it, glories in pointlessness, KOMG has a moral, of all things, and a damn good one at that. GIST AND SPOILER: Jack Nicholson plays a Philly late-night radio personality who tells bleak personal anecdotes-- a Boomer Jean Shepherd, kind of. His inept hustler brother, Bruce Dern, calls him down to Atlantic City one day to get him in on a Hawaiian real estate deal. Of course, their basically is no deal, so Jack, Bruce, Bruce's girl, and her daughter (step-daughter?) have love triangles that don't quite congeal and typically Boomer exploits fueled by foolish fantasies, and aren't all those typical fantasies foolish, seeing as how life isn't a movie and things don't work out so easily and no one gets to be a movie star in real life? How true, how true. I don't know how Atlantic City looks in reality, but in this movie it looks either cast or made up as archetype of just this point.

But there's kind of a twist: at the end, during another halting, proto-Mamet conversation, Bruce's girl, played by Ellen Burstyn, grabs Bruce's revolver, portrayed up to this point as a laughable male power fantasy, and shoots Bruce dead in what w/o a gun would have been a simple lashing out.

Jack comes home and does a broadcast about the debacle. He ends it like this:

...all seemed harmless. No sense in not going along for the ride, not enjoying the games. That's what the trip seemed to be about.... If the goals didn't seem serious for moments, then certainly nothing more serious could happen. Maybe there would even be a trip to blue Hawaii. I certainly didn't wanna stop it. But in the fun house, how do you know who's really crazy? How do you know if it's supposed to be you that stops it, right now? (starts sobbing) And that you don't know how to stop it? The gun was (pause) always w/ the water pistols. (ea)

Had I seen this the beginning of the year, I would have just sneered at it. Bleak movies suck, screw them. Waaa. End of story.

The previous 3 or 4 paragraphs should go inside parentheses, or under an asterisk, but I'm behind on my BB movie reviews and so have a couple birds to kill w/ this post. What I'm saying is, I'm only now in a mental position to appreciate We Were Soldiers despite it not being concerned w/ the things I'm immediately interested in. WWS is a film surprising and moving in its distinctly American humility, brotherly love, and open goodness. The only fault I find is in the editing: Every Deleted Scene should have been left in, "flow" be damned. I defy you to watch the church outtake and tell me you don't feel a fist in your throat.

Since I didn't really have enough in my head to properly memorialize and reflect, I had to learn this Memorial Day. Call me crazy, but I saw a movie that was great education. InstaPunk had a more exciting MD weekend than me, but I did OK for myself.

I'll close w/ a quote from the Amazon customer review: [Randy, who served two tours] He was silent through the film, and when we left the theatre I asked what he thought. He said, "They finally got it. That's what it was like. All the details are right. The actors were just like the men I knew. They looked like that and they talked like that. And the army wives too, they really were like that, at least every one I ever knew." [Then] he was silent for a long time. At last he said, "You remember the scene where the guy tries to pick up a burn victim by the legs and all the skin slides off? Something like that happened to me once. It was at a helicopter crash. I went to pick him up and all the skin just slid right off. It looked just like that, too. I've never told any one about it."