Born on the Forth of July:

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s Liberal and conservative Hollywood were engaged very directly in the process of a capturing an articulate and powerful veteran’s voice, and using this voice articulate the wider journey of America as a nation. Oliver Stone’s Born on the Forth of July is the final word on these discourses and the best Vietnam movie of all. Boasting what is by far and away Tom Cruise’s finest performance to date, Stone’s film tells the true story of Ron Kovic US marine turned peace activist whose extra-ordinary jorney articulates a series of wide and far reaching implications for the nation as a whole.

Fresh from a string of glossy 1980s hits that included Top Gun, Cocktail and Days of Thunder, Cruise had cemented his place as the most promising young star Hollywood had to offer. His early hits relied largely on his good looks and enthusiastic energetic acting style. Stone takes these qualities up and works through them to create and potent and powerful central protagonist (in a screen play co-written by Kovic himself and based on his autobiography of the same name). The first third of the film constructs Cruise as the proto-American, and in Cruise, Stone has the perfect combination of enthusiasm and innocence, embodying perfectly all that America would come to lose in Vietnam.
One problem inherent in all war film’s, a problem which Stone experts navigates is that of film by definition glorifying anything that it depicts. Even in a film as evidently anti-war as Kuberick’s Full Metal Jacket, the beauty with which the combat sequences are depicted can at times function at odds with the film’s broader project.

What Stone does so effectively in Born on the Forth of July is to navigate this very issue, broadening the battle grounds on which war is waged, and presenting the audience with a newly reconstituted type of heroism, one that is inherently American, Fiercely patriotic, idealistic, brave, aggressive and passionate but fundamentally non-violent. The cinematography, shot composition and direction in the protest scenes at the film’s ending mirror the combat sequences, forcing the audience to draw parallels between the two types of conflict. The film uses Kovic story to facilitate a shift from one kind of patriotism to another, from one type of ‘fighting for your country’ to another.

The film begins in small town America, where Kovic is one of a number of young men who grew up watching soldier’s parade on independence day and playing war games in the woods. Kovic is fiercely patriotic and dreams of serving his country, the film traces his journey through high school, and Cruise works well in these scenes as the athletic all American boy which he’s continued to play into his 40s now. The film’s first act is essentially an idyllic journey through small town American life. Kovic is the good honest American and this idyllic period draws to a potent symbolic conclusion on prom night, an event constantly centralised in American film and popular culture as a site for the passage into adulthood. For Kovic it signifies the end of so much he believes in. It is the end of mythic small town America, the very place Kovic is willing to die to protect. Stone plunges both him and us straight into the Vietnam conflict.

The combat sequences are brief and harrowing, having already dealt with ‘the ground war’ in Platoon, Stone doesn’t limit his film to the battle grounds of Vietnam, and there by avoids lending his film the surreal detached unegaging nightmarish style of war film’s such as Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter. Instead he provides a broad over view of the very real consequences of wars for the very ordinary people evolved in them. Stone’s shows use the nightmarish place that America has become for Kovic, and articulates the sense that the America he gave his body to protect wasn’t waiting to embrace thank and welcome him upon his return.

It is during these combat sequences that Kovic is horrifically wounded and paralysed from the chest down, and it upon his return to America that his ‘real war’ must begin. Stone depicts Kovic as a man at war with himself, desperate to come to terms with his dreams and fierce patriotic convictions which have now left him so senselessly shattered. Stone is truly uncompromising in exposing and condemning the successive American administrations which sent thousands of American’s bravest young men to be destroyed thousands of miles away from their homes and their loved ones. Unlike any other major war film, Born on the Forth of July, doesn’t simply divide the veteran’s into those who survived and those who died, but the film dares to use Kovic’s story as the centre piece through which to articulate the very complex relationship returning veterans came to have with the country which sent out to fight for it.
Born on the Fourth of July is a true rarity in the increasingly saturated and highly conservative world of mainstream Hollywood. It takes Kovic’s journey as a metaphor for the nation’s, it’s message is beautifully simple, that the only heroes to emerge from war are soldiers for peace. Stone shows the courage and passion with which Kovic went to war, and then surpasses this with the courage with which he returned from the wilderness of the Mexican w*orehouses and drug dens in which so many more ‘silent’ victims of the Vietnam war quietly lost their lives. This film is far from upsetting in the conventional sense, it isn’t the ‘sad film’ it’s so often characterised as. It is in fact the most heroic of all war film’s, one of the bravest and most uncompromising accounts of the harsh realities and consequences of sending young men into armed conflict it is quiet simply a must see film. Kovic’s story represents an emphatic and triumphant victory for the human spirit in the face of overwhelming odds and at a great personal cost. It is the journey of a true American patriot. Stone’s film dares purport that there is more to war than firing guns and dropping bombs, the message to emerge from this film is powerful. Kovic is characterised as a patriot and a fighter throughout.
His voice emerges as that of heroism redefined, this film is so brave and powerful, almost more brave and powerful than anyone has the right to expect a mainstream big budget/big star Hollywood film to be.
Every once in a while cinema produces truly brave films, that dare to challenge the dangerous myths of national identity, films that dare to challenge America’s relationship to violence, dare to challenge the dangerous myths. Born on the Fourth of July is powerful because it is a message about war from the men (Stone/Kovic) who were there, Stone’s film concluded that there is no heroism in war only lost innocence, it is in dealing with this lost innocence and transforming personal suffering into a truly patriotic cause that true heroism can emerge. Too often in successive phases of Hollywood history draft dodging cowards like John Wayne and John Rambo (Sly Stallone) have perpetuated dangerous mythic representations of violence and armed conflicts the realities of which they know nothing about, watching Cruise gambling his then less than secure career on the portrayal of a hero as complex and controversial as Ron Kovic is both refreshing and inspiring.

The creative control afforded Stone and Kovic is also very rare in modern Hollywood, coupled with Cruise’s uncompromising portrayal make for a true modern masterpiece. This is a film which shouldn’t be over looked. Every single American voter should see this film, what Stone offers is heroism redefined, in Kovic he gives us the true face of patriotism, a real American hero, ‘a john Wayne come home’ (as Kovic describes himself), a brave, relentless fighter whose courage and will surpass any and all the draft dodging gung-ho heroes thrown at us in the majority of popular Hollywood films.

Ron Kovic is legend, a true patriot, a man that all Americans should be proud to call one of their own, a real life hero. Oliver Stone is a brave director, ready willing and able to offer audiences powerful and engaging films, laced with strong honest political content, and beautifully shot and composed to ensure maximum emotional impact and resonance. And Tom Cruise, a brave young actor willing to go against type, and allow the on screen sacrifice of his iconic traits (his physicality/good looks) to play a hero not defined by the size of his muscles or by the size of his gun as was the trend in 1980s action cinema to, all this serves to facilitate the communication of the film’s message and to heighten it’s impact. Born on the Forth of July represents the coming together of Kovic, Cruise and Stone to form one of the truly spectacular film’s of recent years, a film which is sadly more poignant powerful and relevant today as it was, (as Mr. Bush goes about setting a whole new generation of Ron Kovics along the horrowing road from which only the very few will emerge as true American heroes.).


Recommended:
Yes