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"+++dropcap\n\n\"We Were Soldiers,\" the new Mel Gibson movie, takes the Vietnam War away from the reporters, novelists, and film directors who have long portrayed it as a uniquely strange and alienating experience. In this version, Vietnam is no longer America's \"rock-and-roll war\" fought in the jungle by hallucinating hipsters and dazed rednecks, by big-city blacks and racists who wanted to kill \"gooks.\" \"We Were Soldiers\" turns the war over to the white males who were simply brave—the kind of Americans who loved their God, revered their wives, and honored the Asian enemy. The movie is a piece of hero worship devoted to a commander who embodies these virtues—Lieutenant Colonel Harold G. (Hal) Moore, who led the 1st Battalion of the Army's Seventh Cavalry in the bloody battle of Ia Drang, in the central highlands, in late 1965. \"We'll be landing under fire,\" he tells his troops during training at Fort Benning. \"Men will die.\" He's certainly right about that. Hal Moore is the type of implacable warrior who stands in the middle of the fight, refusing to leave the field until everyone is either dead or safely removed. \"We Were Soldiers,\" which is based on a book that Moore wrote with Joseph L. Galloway, a U.P.I. reporter at the time of the war, takes its tone from Moore's temperament—tough-minded, pious, and as square as a headstone. Some of it is stirring, but it's not a very interesting or original piece of work. Randall Wallace, who wrote and directed the movie, never quite deals with the war that he hopes to redeem.\n\n+++\n\nObsessed with such massacres as Custer's Last Stand and the various French humiliations in Indochina, Moore helped develop, as a way of avoiding entrapment, the air-cavalry strategy—drop in by helicopter, do your damage, and then get out fast. Early in the war, four hundred and fifty Americans, many of them under Moore's command, were thrown into a battle against two thousand regulars of the North Vietnamese Army in the Ia Drang Valley. The two sides were eager to test an unfamiliar enemy, and they fought to the death. In the movie, Moore knows that the engagement might be a disaster, but once he gets in he doesn't much want to get out. What the movie doesn't tell us is that a third of the American forces died in the four-day battle. Its point of view is simply that a fight is a fight and never mind whether the victory is worth an enormously high casualty rate. But it does tell us all about the men who were there: their family lives, their prayers, their fears. Essentially, \"We Were Soldiers\" assimilates Vietnam into the Second World War; it recapitulates the many movies made in the forties and fifties which portrayed the Americans as good people fighting for a just cause. Only this time no one says what the cause is. Communism is never mentioned. Neither is China or Russia, and there's no sign of the fallible ally, the South Vietnamese. \"I'm glad I can die for my country,\" one young soldier says, his face turning white as the life drains out of him. That unlikely line indicates what \"We Were Soldiers\" believes in—dying well as an American, and making a speech about it.\n\nThe movie is narrated in resolute and noble phrases by Galloway (Barry Pepper), and it sets out, in exemplary scenes, the life of ideal American warriors. The training is harsh, the leadership inspired, the wives as supportive as deeply rooted oaks. The movie appears to herald a time of pre-feminist obedience. Just before the men go off, the women, made up to the hilt, their hair in bouffant splendor, gather in a circle and talk of laundry; later in the movie their function is to grieve. Randall Wallace's approach to the women is unconsciously condescending, and his indifference creates one mini-disaster. As Moore's wife, Madeleine Stowe, who demonstrated a provocative streak of wildness in such movies as \"Short Cuts,\" has been thoroughly tamed. Her lips puffed, Stowe wears her hair in drapey black tresses that make her look like an escapee from \"The Addams Family,\" and her scenes with tough-guy Gibson die on the screen.\n\nGibson has a much more vital relationship with Sam Elliott, who plays the unit's hardtack sergeant major. Elliott, a growler, must soak his vocal cords in testosterone every night: he makes John Wayne sound like a member of the Vienna Boys' Choir. In gruff tones, he delivers one of the ripest pieces of flattery in the history of military praise. \"Custer was a pussy,\" he says to Gibson. \"You ain't.\" Gibson acknowledges the remark with a nod. As Moore, he's leathery but quick and alert, his eyes darting this way and that. When he runs from one part of the perimeter to another, his M-16 blazing, the movie is exciting in a rudimentary, gung-ho way. Much of the combat is staged at very close range, with masses of North Vietnamese infantry hurling themselves against American riflemen. Wallace gets the scramble and near-panic of close combat, the desperate improvisations. When the Americans are overrun, and Moore calls in an air strike that hits both American and Vietnamese troops, the fear becomes as palpable as sweat.\n\nYet as art this revisionist movie, grimly effective as some of it is, doesn't hold a candle to the remarkable cycle of pictures in the late seventies and the eighties which captured the discordant character of a tragic war—\"The Deer Hunter,\" \"Apocalypse Now,\" \"Platoon,\" \"Full Metal Jacket,\" and the rest. The war *was* partly redeemed by the great movies that tried to capture the essence of it. I can't think of another country that has taken on the burden of guilt more willingly in its popular art. By contrast, Wallace and Gibson wash out our minds with soap: no drugs, no civilian deaths, no night fits in *their* movie. They expunge the most unsettling parts of the war while solemnizing sacrifice and death. \"We Were Soldiers\" is so much in love with Hal Moore's true grit that it never acknowledges, even in passing, that the Pentagon used such capable and intelligent men to lead us into a catastrophe without parallel in American history.\n\n+++dropcap\n\nThe actor Josh Hartnett has sweet, boyishly handsome features, a friendly, earnest manner, and a voice that barely rises above a whisper. Modesty in a good-looking young man can be attractive, but Hartnett needs to develop a screen personality that rises above a whisper if he's going to become a star. In the sex comedy \"40 Days and 40 Nights,\" he initially seems to be the right actor to play Matt, a San Francisco Web designer from a Catholic family who gets dumped by his glamorous girlfriend and undergoes so much unease with other women that he decides to swear off sex for the period of Lent—forty days and forty nights. In Matt's office, the situation is regarded as hilarious, and everyone becomes obsessed with it: people place bets on which day Matt will fall off the wagon. The men talk about him all the time, and the women try to seduce him. When poor Matt meets a saucy new girl, Erica (Shannyn Sossamon), he backs away from her, then changes course and makes friends only to back away again. His eyes brimming with terror, tripping and falling all over the place, Hartnett throws himself into the performance physically. Matt goes crazy with shame and lust, and some of Hartnett's corkscrew desperation is funny. But the director, Michael Lehmann, allows Hartnett to repeat himself a lot, perhaps because the screenwriter, Robert Perez, hasn't written enough for the character. It's not so much sex that Matt seems eager to avoid as it is speech. Who *is* this guy? Hartnett, for all his conniptions, doesn't pull anything distinctive out of himself, and after a while Matt just seems unformed—a dope who committed himself to a meaningless stunt that he can't get out of. All of which leaves a big vacuum at the center of the movie, since, except for Matt and Erica, everyone in sight is a colossal jerk. The men are losers, the women are slutty, and they all come off as drooling voyeurs. Although \"40 Days and 40 Nights\" is set among allegedly hip San Francisco people in their twenties, the sensibility of the movie is naggingly adolescent—less erotic than squeamish and giggly. Two of the producers, Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, of the successful English company Working Title, made their reputations with such smart romantic comedies as \"Four Weddings and a Funeral,\" \"Notting Hill,\" and \"Bridget Jones's Diary.\" How could they have agreed to produce a script as infantile as this one? Did they assume that an American audience would never accept American characters with brains? ♦\n\n+++\n\n"
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/03/11/good-guys>