214. Born on the Fourth of July

Song - Born in the U.S.A (Bruce Springsteen)

Movie: Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989)

Born on the Fourth of July, is a (mostly) good movie, but it only truly becomes a certified 'Oliver Stone' once it reaches Mexico. Up until then, with the exception of a couple of hospital scenes, the film is easily recognisable as historic fiction. There are some scenes where Stone makes quite unconventional stylstic choices, but those all serve to illuminate the period he depicts and contextualise the characters' feelings and motivations. In Mexico, any sense of objective realism is thrown out of the window, in favor of maximalist subjective frenzy. And when it comes to that, Stone has no equal. Every shot is slightly off kilter, depicting something that could theoretically exist but feels unreal and the editing choices become more incoherent and mostly serve as a representation of (societal and individual) irrationality. As a result the film becomes fervidly disjointed, culiminating in a menacingly intense fight between the disabled and disillusioned Vietnam veterans Ron Kovic (the film is based on his autobiography, and co-written by him) and Charlie. Ron and Charlie are played by Tom Cruise and Willem Dafoe, who have not been instructed to be subtle. 

I get why people find Stone's descents into pompously irrational lunacy offputting, but I find it greatly appealing. It feels like a miracle that he successfully sustained such a maximalist approach for an entire runinng time in films like JFK, The Doors and Nixon. I haven't seen Natural Born Killers; that one always felt a little much, even for me, and it's probably for the best that he doesn't go entirely overboard in Born on the Fourth of July. With Tom Cruise as your lead actor you don't need to. I have always liked Cruise, but I never expected him to transform into a generous team player in the latest Mission Impossible and Top Gun films. He has always performed a bit as if he is outside of the reality of the other actors around him, making his own fabricated reality the center of the stage. Stone likes to do the same, and because he pushes the artificiality and subjectivity even further than Cruise, I think he is still quite valuable as a political fillmmaker. If you want to truly counter the idea that American power and American exceptionalism are objective virtues, you should not just criticise American power and exceptionalism, but also hightlight that your own criticism is not an objective truth. 

Born on the Fourth of July has a much more realistic 'objective' approach to historic fiction than Stone's subsequent films. Such an approach exposes much more Stone's own ideas and those don't always turn out to to be terribly insightful. Born on the Fourth of July makes less use of bluntly simplistic metaphors than Platoon, and is also more morally conscious, but it's also not nearly as sophisticated as it tthinks it is. Stone is clearly very proud of his recurring Fourth of July Parade sequences, and rightly so. They are wonderfully staged set-pieces, but all they communicate is that if you look beyond the pretty surface, America actually tells a lot of lies to its citizens. The film isn't really interested in any big ideas beyond that, and tries way too hard to turn this notion into an unifying theory that explains all of America. That's quite a shame, because when it focuses specifically on how the idea of patriotism affects Ron's life and relationships, it's really very good. It does have some other terribly misconceived characters, most notably Donna (Kyra Sedgwick). She is Cruise' childhood flame who is set up to spark his political awakening. Stone is just self-aware enough to realise just in time that this would be quite a hackneyed development, but that does mean that all the scenes between Donna and Ron never become anything more than uninspired filler,