Now Playing at the Valencia by Stephen Hunter

Author:Stephen Hunter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

An enraged world, driven by an enraged media, demands justice for the baby killers. An administration of professional appeasers (no names, please) demands that Childers take the sole blame. Childers is court-martialed and put on trial for murder. He chooses as his attorney another colonel, Hayes Hodges (that supremely weary, wary old pro Tommy Lee Jones), who warns him up front that he’s a weak lawyer and he’d be much better with “someone like Bob Bennett.” But Childers knows that Hodges won’t let him down; they shared the same mud and the same blood thirty years back, in a stink-hole glade in the ’Nam, where Childers saved Hodges’s life, even if the act of mercy concealed an act of murder.

The director is another old, old pro: William Friedkin, who years ago directed The Exorcist and The French Connection. He’s great at the action stuff, particularly the way he uses sound to compensate for the budgetary limits placed on the film’s production; his visions of battle in Vietnam and Yemen are quite convincing (Dale Dye, an ex-marine officer who’s made a career advising Hollywood films, was involved in the production and appears as a general officer).

But the film, ultimately, is about ideas, which are encrypted into the court case that takes up the majority of the running time, so that the film is sort of A Few Good Men retold from Jack Nicholson’s point of view. The marines would call it A Few Good Men, too, but without the sniggering irony in the inflection.

The initially inept Hodges finds himself up against a noncombat hotshot major (Guy Pearce, hiding his Aussie accent behind a New York one), and heavy hitters from the administration (represented by Bruce Greenwood as the national security adviser); key evidence of exoneration is destroyed. Witnesses are coerced into lying, or lie out of self-preservation. The machine clicks into fifth gear: You know the drill—spin, cover-up, selective leak.

Conservative politics aside, is it a brilliant courtroom drama? Not really. Does it ever reach the incendiary pitch of the mano a mano between Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men? Not even close. But it does do one bullheaded thing that took a great deal of Marine Corps guts: It speaks the truth that Nicholson’s colonel didn’t believe the rest of us could handle.

It’s an icky, unpleasant belief. That melancholy truth: The marines’ job isn’t just to die for their country. Sometimes it’s to kill for their country.

The movie says: If you send men into battle expecting tidy, “surgical” responses, that’s fine. But battle, particularly the kind of close-quarter urban mayhem in which the marines must prevail, can’t always be kept tidy and surgical. Things happen. Men die. Panic sets in. Pain and blood fog clear thinking. Us or Them becomes the organization of the universe. When the command to open fire is given, people will die tragically, many of them innocent. It’s called collateral damage when the air force does it; it’s called dead babies when the marines do it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.