Stone film heaven-sent, earthbound

Stone film heaven-sent, earthbound

By Jane Scott

JAKARTA (JP): Heaven and Earth is a recent film from American
director Oliver Stone that has arrived in Jakarta after being
released overseas early last year.

The director's most recent film Natural Born Killers also went
on release in 1994 and has generated the sort of controversy we
have come to expect of the combative films (JFK, The Doors) we
get from this bad-boy of the American cinema. In Heaven and Earth
Stone returns to his most worked-over subject in cinema -- the
Vietnam War.

Stone has made three films about the war and its outcomes,
forming a trilogy which is an interesting progression through
revolving doors. First off there was Platoon which looked at the
moral dilemma of war from the trenchline perspective of American
servicemen. The image of an agonized, beatified Willem Dafoe,
taken by a bullet, is with us still. Platoon is a tribute to the
"grunt", to the, serviceman who was on the ground engaged in
fighting hand-to-hand, the soldier who had little to say of his
predicament, and to whom no one would listen to anyway. Then came
Born on the Fourth of July with Tom Cruise as a returned
serviceman, a paraplegic, coming to terms with his disability,
coping with the government's neglect of returnees of the day, and
with what Vietnam -- a rallying point for a generation -- meant
to others back home.

Now, directing his third "Nam" film, for which he also wrote
the screenplay, Stone returns to South East Asia and the theater
of war and revisits, we presume, the haunted chambers of his
memory. Knowing that Stone himself survived Vietnam as a young
serviceman offers an easy explanation for his returning to the
Vietnam experience for another look, with his obsession of
rearranging the building blocks of perspective. You have the
feeling that over the years and over the films there have
been several perspectival shifts.

Heaven and Earth begins in the heart of central Vietnam, near
Da Nang, in the 1950s. As the prologue explains, it is between
heaven and earth that the people struggle to bring forth the
harvest and to observe the teachings of Buddha. Father Heaven and
Mother Earth have different wisdoms to impart to children like Le
Ly, who is one of a family of six children. Her mother (played by
Joan Chen whom is almost unrecognizable) would explain to her
where babies come from, and her father would teach her about god
and ancestry, the "people she could not see". Both parents would
impart life's mysteries. Where life's experiences were confined
to a simple cycle that rotated between the sky above and the
fields below, a life buttressed by a protrusion of mountain
peaks, such wisdoms would suffice.

But the rural idyll is only temporary. Beyond this tranquil
vision and beyond the ambient sound of lowing water buffalo, the
forces of change trudge with soldiers' boots and whir with
helicopter blades towards it. As Le Ly's voice-over informs us,
this lovely land has long been a battleground. For hundreds of
years the soldiers of the warlords came and laid waste to the
village of her forefathers, just as the Japanese, the Chinese and
the French and the Americans have done since. The Vietcong who
first enter the village in 1963 and net two of Le Ly's brothers
are also represented as oppressors who operate by night and rape
their own.

With a little poetry to the opening prologue sequence, the
film has you lulled into thinking that the director has taken a
different turn. But it is only a detour and Stone soon returns to
more familiar territory. The opening is an interlude, a moment in
history, with its images of a restored and virginal Vietnam,
waiting. Establishing wide-screen shots of the rice-farming
village and its surroundings are scenes of powerful beauty that
are not usually seen in the director's repertoire. Silhouetted
figures labor in rice fields that are sheer sheets of water when
the sun is low; winds running their fingers through long grasses
are caught in frame and the changes to the landscape in different
light is registered, as though it mattered.

Nothing could be as sinister as the appearance of marauding
helicopters in Coppola's apocryphal Vietnam film Apocalypse Now,
but -- snap -- the moment when Le Ly is alone in a field and
looks up to see a dark underbelly of a helicopter hovering
overhead, is a moment of condensed menace. The camera pulls away
to catch Le Ly's hat blown across the bending grasses. It's the
moment innocence is lost.

The peaceful idyll of the village had only served to pack a
punch for the onslaught to come, the beauties described by the
camera served the impact of horror to come. In the confusion of
wartime, Le Ly is (apparently) wrongfully taken first by the
South Vietnamese army and then by the Vietcong. She is suspected
of having Vietcong sympathies and arrested and tortured by
Government soldiers. But surviving this experience of snakes,
ants and diabolical electrical devices then suddenly being
released from prison (her mother pays for her release with her
dowry) makes her a suspect with the Vietcong, who then exact
their own form of vengeance.

She then leaves the village and with her mother's help she
finds a job as a maid with a wealthy family in Saigon. But an
affair with the master of the house leaves her pregnant and she
is reduced to more lowly circumstances, living with a sister back
in Da Nang and working as a street peddler.

Then, out of somewhere, steps a wonderfully world-weary Tommy
Lee Jones ("I just want a little peace and happiness") who
appears on the scene as a U.S. Marine and picks her out in a
crowd. He is eventually rewarded when she responds to his
attentions. He talks of commitment, he offers her a ring -- and
they have a child. Le Ly slowly becomes persuaded that life is
better somewhere else, away from catastrophe in her own country
as the battle for Vietnam escalates.

She leaves with Steve and the children for a new life in
California and the films cuts abruptly to the front seat of a car
with Steve, Le Ly and the children on their way to lunch. They
roll into the driveway of the family bungalow in suburban San
Diego.

Steve's sister, his mother and the family pooches appear. And
who is Mum? She is none other than that icon of the 1950s, Debbie
Reynolds, the teenage cutesy with the bobbing blonde curls. Don't
you think Stone is having a little joke with us with this piece
of casting? The joke continues with fish-eye lensed distortions
of Mum and Sis and the family freezer stacked with food and all
the general paraphernalia of the contemporary western home
looking a bit funny. Out shopping, low-angle shots continue as we
roll up and down the aisles at the local supermarket, goggle-eyed
as Le Ly at the mountains of food.

But tragedy takes over from social parody and in this film it
is the Tommy Lee Jones character, the returned veteran, who
becomes the true focus of Stone's interest. Anti-hero to Le Ly's
hero, he is not able to put his life together again after the
experience of war. He even talks of wanting to go back to
Vietnam.

Le Ly's is a different story, which I will leave for you to
see. Is Heaven and Earth her story or is it Steve's? Le Ly is
Vietnam itself, and, in the end it is Steve who is the
protagonist. I rather think that it is Steve's story, as the
American film industry catches up with the fact of Vietnam so
long after it's over. Aside from The Green Berets, the John Wayne
(lead actor and co-director) film of 1968, there was very little
about Vietnam on screen before the baton was taken up by
Sylvester Stallone in the Rambo movies. Now, with films like
Heaven and Earth, there is a little more to talk about.