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By Marc Leepson
I’m a big, big fan of the creative, innovative movie-making
abilities of the Coen Brothers, Ethan and Joel. I’ve
seen all of their movies. The best of them—Miller’s
Crossing; Fargo; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; Raising Arizona;
The Big Lebowski—are fiendishly clever, hugely entertaining,
and brilliantly acted, filmed, and edited.
I sometimes cringe
at the Coens’ propensity for in-your-face,
gratuitous violence, especially in Blood Simple, Miller’s
Crossing, and Fargo, but have been able to overcome my squeamishness
because the bloody mayhem seemed to be integral parts of
those films. Which brings us to the writer-director Coens’ latest,
much ballyhooed movie, No Country For Old Men. This blood-and-gore-infused
thriller, which is set in Texas in 1980 and features two
Vietnam veteran characters, hit the multiplexes in November
to mostly rave reviews.
The film adheres closely to the plot
of the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, a book I read
and did not like for several reasons. The main one: the immense
amount of sociopathic mayhem perpetuated by the insane villain
of the piece, a killing-and-maiming machine with the strange
name of Anton Chigurh, played to psychotic perfection in
the movie by the great Spanish actor Javier Bardem. What
also put me off about the book was McCarthy’s portrayal
of the two Vietnam veterans as more or less gun-totin’ societal
misfits.
McCarthy,
who served in the U.S. Air Force from 1953-57 (and the Coens
who were born during those years), give us Carson Wells (a
taciturn, steely-eyed Woody Harrelson in the movie), a professional
hit man who served with the Special Forces, and Llewellyn
Moss (very convincingly acted by Josh Brolin), a low-rent
Texan who did two tours in Vietnam with the “12th
Infantry Battalion.”
I guess a few of the 2.8 million
men who served in Vietnam made their living as paid assassins
back in the eighties; and more than a few liked to hunt in
the great outdoors and made a few really bad life decisions.
I know why these guys are in the novel and the movie: because
no one wants to read a book or see a movie based on the experiences
of the overwhelming majority of those of us who served in
Vietnam and went on to careers in various average-Joe, nonviolent
walks of life and to live quietly with our families and friends.
So, as
I sat down to watch No Country, I was prepared to see a movie
featuring two more stereotypical, violence-prone cinematic
Vietnam veterans. I was pleasantly surprised, though, as
I soon realized that the Coens avoided making Moss and Wells
into stereotypes. They are fully realized characters, even
if they are repugnant.
Moss, the movie’s protagonist
and main character, for example, is not an evil man. Nor
is he an ultra-violent type. On the other hand, he makes
a dumb, monumental mistake, taking two million in drug money
he finds while hunting and coming across a grisly drug-deal-gone-bad
scene, all the time realizing the potential consequences
of his actions. As the dire consequences played out, I kept
thinking of that great line from Converse, the jaded Vietnam
War correspondent in the movie Who’ll
Stop the Rain?, which went something like: “I’ve
waited my entire life to f&*^ up like this.”
As
for remorseless killer Anton Chigur, we can all say a silent
prayer that nothing is said about him having served his nation
in the Vietnam War. Otherwise, he would have been the cinematic
Vietnam vet from hell.
What I didn’t like
about the movie (aside from the tsunami of in-your-face blood
and guts) was its pointlessness, its slow pacing, and the
fact that, to me, it fell flat in the last ten or fifteen
minutes, following the demise of a certain character. It
was a thriller, you could say, that just was not very thrilling.
It was almost boring in parts, which is a first for a Coen
Brothers movie.
Still, even the
Coen Brothers’ misses are better than
95 percent of the crap that Hollywood churns out. You will
get plenty of terrific cinematography here, some great black
humor, and sterling performances from all the players, including
Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who does his usual
great job with a meaty part.
AMERICAN GANGSTER
Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, which came out in
November to rave reviews and did very well at the box office,
stars Denzel Washington as true-life Harlem drug kingpin
Frank Lucas. The film is set in the late sixties and early
seventies, and the Vietnam War is integral to the main plot.
Lucas hears of widespread drug use in Vietnam, flies to Northern
Thailand to check it out, and then begins smuggling high-grade
Asian heroin to the States in what can only be described
as a cold-blooded but clever manner.
I skipped the movie because
those facts had escaped my radar, until they were pointed
out by my friend, David Willson. “There
are also dramatic scenes that take place in S.E. Asia, two
of which involve Denzel Washington’s character, front
and center,” Willson told me. “There are also
frequent newsreel depictions of Vietnam War-related news,
and there’s a major scene in the United States involving
the American military, related to using military planes,
military personnel, and military coffins to transport the
evil drugs.”
The Vietnam War, Willson said, “is
at the center of the film as it’s the enabler for Frank
Lucas to obtain the drugs he sells in great amounts in New
York. The war is the conduit for the drugs. When the war
ends, Frank Lucas is done.”
FORTY YEARS AGO
Somebody once said that during the year 1968, the United
States suffered a nervous breakdown. Two demoralizing assassinations,
race riots in big cities, and the chaos of the Democratic
National Convention in Chicago at home, along with the Tet
Offensive and its aftermath in Vietnam, certainly made for
one painful year. Now that 2008 is upon us, it’s inevitable
that the media will mark this quasi-newsworthy event with
plenty of looking-back coverage.
The coverage, in fact, started
late last year. Newsweek, for example, devoted a hefty section
of its November 19 issue to a group of essays about 1968.
The issue, with a cover by iconic sixties artist Peter Max,
referred to 1968 as “the
year that made us who we are,” on the cover; as part
of “an era that just won’t end,” on the
content’s page; as “a world in disarray,” on
the Newsweek.com page; and as “the year that changed
everything,” as the headline of the main article, by
Jonathan Darman, put it.
Why the hoop-to-do? Because, Darman
says, “all of us,
young and old, are stuck in the ’60s, hostages to a
decade we define ourselves as for or against.” The
sixties, he says, “were not necessarily, as some baby
boomers would have it, America’s defining moment. But
they were an era when a generation held sustained argument
over the things that have always mattered most: How should
America show its power in the world? What rights were owed
to African-Americans, to women, to gays? What is America
and what does it want to be?”
Fair enough questions.
But something about the whole exercise did not sit right
with this Army veteran who spent nearly the entire year of
1968 in Vietnam and who has spent probably too much time
since then writing and thinking about the sixties. What struck
me most negatively about the Newsweek issue was the full-page
black and white close-up photo of Robert S. McNamara in a
section called “Faces of the Fiery Year.” Why
highlight this man who presided over a war he thought unwinnable
from the beginning but continued to prosecute for eight years?
McNamara’s half-smiling visage in that issue is a slap
in the face to the millions of American servicemen and women
who risked their lives in “McNamara’s War,” not
to mention the families of those who died there in large
part due to McNamara’s disingenuousness, flat-out dishonesty,
and arrogance.
The other smelly component of that issue was
the excerpt from Tom Brokaw’s new book, Boom! Voices
of the Sixties. No, Brokaw is not in the same villainous
league as McNamara. But who appointed him to the position
of Generational Expert Commentator? This is the same retired
NBC News anchor who coined the phrase “The Greatest
Generation,” in
his upbeat book about our parents’ generation. I’d
always thought if there was a “greatest” American
generation, it was the one that included George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Paine,
and company.
Why exactly is our parents’ generational
cohort the “greatest”?
Primarily, Brokaw says, because they came of age during World
War II, a war against true evil, and they prevailed. But
they did not choose their war. And they have more than a
few “un-great” things to answer for after the
war ended.
Such as the fact that the late 1940s, the 1950s,
and early 1960s were an era of institutionalized racism and
sexism, a time when we started the misadventure in Vietnam,
and a period of untrammeled, virtually unregulated pollution
of the Earth. There was nothing remotely great or “greatest” about
that legacy as far as I am concerned.
In Boom! Brokaw has
some good things to say about Vietnam veterans, although
it’s nothing that we haven’t
been writing about in these pages for decades. There is precious
little insight into the (not-so-great?) Vietnam War generation.
The same can be said about a two-hour “television event” based
on the book called 1968: With Tom Brokaw, which appeared
on the History Channel December 9. In that show, Brokaw,
the channel’s publicity folks said, “offers his
perspective on the era and shares the rich personal odysseys
of some of the people who lived through that chaotic time,
along with the stories of younger people now experiencing
its aftershocks.”
Save me from Tom Brokaw’s perspective.
The only thing I learned from his “perspective” that
had a modicum of interest is that Brokaw (who was born in
1940) says he tried to enlist in the Army and Navy during
the Vietnam War, but was rejected because of “flat
feet.”
ARTS
IN BRIEF
“The Remembered,” a performance made up of a
compilation of messages posted by visitors to the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial’s Virtual Wall web site, had its
world premiere in October at Hofstra University’s John
Cranford Adams Playhouse. Written by Elliott Levine and directed
by Bob Spiotto, the performance featured images from the
book Letters on the Wall by Michael Sofarelli. Proceeds from
the performance went to the Stephen B. Carlin and Walter
W. Rudolph Endowed Memorial Scholarship for first-year Hofstra
students who are the children or grandchildren of Vietnam
veterans.
Ed Milligan, who retired after serving for 25 years
in the U.S. military, including two years in Vietnam, started
his monthly radio program, “The Veterans Hour,” on
KFGO, 790 AM in Fargo, North Dakota, five years ago. You
can listen to archived shows online at www.tristateveterans.com and clicking on the “Veterans Hour.”
Last summer,
fourteen Princeton University undergraduate students took
part in a unique seminar called “America
and Vietnam at War: Origins, Implications and Consequences.” The
course, dubbed a “global seminar,” took place
in Vietnam. It was the first such seminar offered by Princeton’s
Institute of International Relations and Regional Studies,
and it drew students with majors that included chemical engineering,
anthropology, and foreign affairs.
The seminar was led by
Desaix Anderson, 71, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer
who served for 18 months in Vietnam in 1965-66, and then
headed the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi in 1995. His students took
classes at Hanoi’s National
University, took part in community service endeavors, and
otherwise immersed themselves in Vietnamese language and
culture in Hanoi, Hoi An, Hue, Danang, and elsewhere around
the country. Anderson gave half the lectures. The class also
heard from a dozen Vietnamese academics, authors (including
NVA veteran and acclaimed novelist Bao Ninh), former military
officials, and government representatives.
QUERIES
Richard Jellerson, who flew two helicopter tours in the Vietnam
War, is co-producing a documentary about the Hmong who fought
on the side of the United States in the so-called Secret
War in Laos. He would like to hear from Americans who were
rescued by the Hmong. You can contact him at Storyteller
Films at 626-355-0260 or email Richard@storytellerfilms.tv
As
a follow-up to his previous anthology of veterans’ poems,
Post Traumatic Press 2007, Dayl Wise, who served with the
First Cav in Vietnam in 1969, is taking submissions of poems
and short stories from veterans, family members of veterans,
and non-veterans with experiences of the military.
“I’m
looking for work on loss and reconciliation,” Wise
told us. “Openly political stuff will be considered.” He
would like to receive submissions by April 1.
His plan is
to offer two of the chapbooks gratis to each contributor
and to sell the rest to offset the cost, with any profits
going to Veterans for Peace. If interested, send your work
via email to dswbike@aol.com You can either paste your poem
or story in the body or attach it as a file. Also include
a short bio and photo. You may also mail your submission
to 2206 Holland Ave., Apt 5D, Bronx, NY 10467. For questions,
call 718-231-0616 or 845-679-2161, and mention you read about
it in these pages.
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