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.