Stone film heaven-sent, earthbound<\/p>\n
By Jane Scott<\/p>\n
JAKARTA (JP): Heaven and Earth is a recent film from American
\ndirector Oliver Stone that has arrived in Jakarta after being
\nreleased overseas early last year.<\/p>\n
The director's most recent film Natural Born Killers also went
\non release in 1994 and has generated the sort of controversy we
\nhave come to expect of the combative films (JFK, The Doors) we
\nget from this bad-boy of the American cinema. In Heaven and Earth
\nStone returns to his most worked-over subject in cinema -- the
\nVietnam War.<\/p>\n
Stone has made three films about the war and its outcomes,
\nforming a trilogy which is an interesting progression through
\nrevolving doors. First off there was Platoon which looked at the
\nmoral dilemma of war from the trenchline perspective of American
\nservicemen. The image of an agonized, beatified Willem Dafoe,
\ntaken by a bullet, is with us still. Platoon is a tribute to the
\n\"grunt\", to the, serviceman who was on the ground engaged in
\nfighting hand-to-hand, the soldier who had little to say of his
\npredicament, and to whom no one would listen to anyway. Then came
\nBorn on the Fourth of July with Tom Cruise as a returned
\nserviceman, a paraplegic, coming to terms with his disability,
\ncoping with the government's neglect of returnees of the day, and
\nwith what Vietnam -- a rallying point for a generation -- meant
\nto others back home.<\/p>\n
Now, directing his third \"Nam\" film, for which he also wrote
\nthe screenplay, Stone returns to South East Asia and the theater
\nof war and revisits, we presume, the haunted chambers of his
\nmemory. Knowing that Stone himself survived Vietnam as a young
\nserviceman offers an easy explanation for his returning to the
\nVietnam experience for another look, with his obsession of
\nrearranging the building blocks of perspective. You have the
\nfeeling that over the years and over the films there have
\nbeen several perspectival shifts.<\/p>\n
Heaven and Earth begins in the heart of central Vietnam, near
\nDa Nang, in the 1950s. As the prologue explains, it is between
\nheaven and earth that the people struggle to bring forth the
\nharvest and to observe the teachings of Buddha. Father Heaven and
\nMother Earth have different wisdoms to impart to children like Le
\nLy, who is one of a family of six children. Her mother (played by
\nJoan Chen whom is almost unrecognizable) would explain to her
\nwhere babies come from, and her father would teach her about god
\nand ancestry, the \"people she could not see\". Both parents would
\nimpart life's mysteries. Where life's experiences were confined
\nto a simple cycle that rotated between the sky above and the
\nfields below, a life buttressed by a protrusion of mountain
\npeaks, such wisdoms would suffice.<\/p>\n
But the rural idyll is only temporary. Beyond this tranquil
\nvision and beyond the ambient sound of lowing water buffalo, the
\nforces of change trudge with soldiers' boots and whir with
\nhelicopter blades towards it. As Le Ly's voice-over informs us,
\nthis lovely land has long been a battleground. For hundreds of
\nyears the soldiers of the warlords came and laid waste to the
\nvillage of her forefathers, just as the Japanese, the Chinese and
\nthe French and the Americans have done since. The Vietcong who
\nfirst enter the village in 1963 and net two of Le Ly's brothers
\nare also represented as oppressors who operate by night and rape
\ntheir own.<\/p>\n
With a little poetry to the opening prologue sequence, the
\nfilm has you lulled into thinking that the director has taken a
\ndifferent turn. But it is only a detour and Stone soon returns to
\nmore familiar territory. The opening is an interlude, a moment in
\nhistory, with its images of a restored and virginal Vietnam,
\nwaiting. Establishing wide-screen shots of the rice-farming
\nvillage and its surroundings are scenes of powerful beauty that
\nare not usually seen in the director's repertoire. Silhouetted
\nfigures labor in rice fields that are sheer sheets of water when
\nthe sun is low; winds running their fingers through long grasses
\nare caught in frame and the changes to the landscape in different
\nlight is registered, as though it mattered.<\/p>\n
Nothing could be as sinister as the appearance of marauding
\nhelicopters in Coppola's apocryphal Vietnam film Apocalypse Now,
\nbut -- snap -- the moment when Le Ly is alone in a field and
\nlooks up to see a dark underbelly of a helicopter hovering
\noverhead, is a moment of condensed menace. The camera pulls away
\nto catch Le Ly's hat blown across the bending grasses. It's the
\nmoment innocence is lost.<\/p>\n
The peaceful idyll of the village had only served to pack a
\npunch for the onslaught to come, the beauties described by the
\ncamera served the impact of horror to come. In the confusion of
\nwartime, Le Ly is (apparently) wrongfully taken first by the
\nSouth Vietnamese army and then by the Vietcong. She is suspected
\nof having Vietcong sympathies and arrested and tortured by
\nGovernment soldiers. But surviving this experience of snakes,
\nants and diabolical electrical devices then suddenly being
\nreleased from prison (her mother pays for her release with her
\ndowry) makes her a suspect with the Vietcong, who then exact
\ntheir own form of vengeance.<\/p>\n
She then leaves the village and with her mother's help she
\nfinds a job as a maid with a wealthy family in Saigon. But an
\naffair with the master of the house leaves her pregnant and she
\nis reduced to more lowly circumstances, living with a sister back
\nin Da Nang and working as a street peddler.<\/p>\n
Then, out of somewhere, steps a wonderfully world-weary Tommy
\nLee Jones (\"I just want a little peace and happiness\") who
\nappears on the scene as a U.S. Marine and picks her out in a
\ncrowd. He is eventually rewarded when she responds to his
\nattentions. He talks of commitment, he offers her a ring -- and
\nthey have a child. Le Ly slowly becomes persuaded that life is
\nbetter somewhere else, away from catastrophe in her own country
\nas the battle for Vietnam escalates.<\/p>\n
She leaves with Steve and the children for a new life in
\nCalifornia and the films cuts abruptly to the front seat of a car
\nwith Steve, Le Ly and the children on their way to lunch. They
\nroll into the driveway of the family bungalow in suburban San
\nDiego.<\/p>\n
Steve's sister, his mother and the family pooches appear. And
\nwho is Mum? She is none other than that icon of the 1950s, Debbie
\nReynolds, the teenage cutesy with the bobbing blonde curls. Don't
\nyou think Stone is having a little joke with us with this piece
\nof casting? The joke continues with fish-eye lensed distortions
\nof Mum and Sis and the family freezer stacked with food and all
\nthe general paraphernalia of the contemporary western home
\nlooking a bit funny. Out shopping, low-angle shots continue as we
\nroll up and down the aisles at the local supermarket, goggle-eyed
\nas Le Ly at the mountains of food.<\/p>\n
But tragedy takes over from social parody and in this film it
\nis the Tommy Lee Jones character, the returned veteran, who
\nbecomes the true focus of Stone's interest. Anti-hero to Le Ly's
\nhero, he is not able to put his life together again after the
\nexperience of war. He even talks of wanting to go back to
\nVietnam.<\/p>\n
Le Ly's is a different story, which I will leave for you to
\nsee. Is Heaven and Earth her story or is it Steve's? Le Ly is
\nVietnam itself, and, in the end it is Steve who is the
\nprotagonist. I rather think that it is Steve's story, as the
\nAmerican film industry catches up with the fact of Vietnam so
\nlong after it's over. Aside from The Green Berets, the John Wayne
\n(lead actor and co-director) film of 1968, there was very little
\nabout Vietnam on screen before the baton was taken up by
\nSylvester Stallone in the Rambo movies. Now, with films like
\nHeaven and Earth, there is a little more to talk about.<\/p>",
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