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By Marc Leepson
The nation’s film critics generally
were not kind to Bobby, the actor/writer/director
Emilio Estevez’s requiem
for the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy, which opened in theaters
around Thanksgiving. The kinder critics compared the film,
unfavorably, to Robert Altman’s great movies—Nashville and Short
Cuts, for example. The crankier critics compared
it, unfavorably, to kitchy, low-rent disaster films such
as Airport. A few compared Bobby, sort of favorably, to well-regarded
flicks, namely Grand Hotel and From
Here to Eternity.
Altman
did come to mind as your arts editor sat through Bobby. That’s
because Estevez, perhaps best known for his starring role
in The Mighty Ducks, ambitiously created 22 characters for
Bobby, and he tossed them into at least a dozen often overlapping
subplots. That’s a good thing.
What doesn’t work as well is the fact that several
of the stories are all but pointless, some of the dialogue
is tortuously trite, and that, unlike Altman’s films,
there is precious little humor amid the drama and melodrama.
On
the positive side, several actors in this film are among
Hollywood’s finest, and they perform up to their usual
high standards. The A List: Laurence Fishburne, who plays
a dignified sous chef; Anthony Hopkins, a conflicted retired
doorman; William H. Macy, a self-important hotel management
type; Sharon Stone, a hotel hairdresser and Macy’s
put-upon wife; and Helen Hunt, a rich man’s vacuous
wife. The other name actors in the cast: Martin Sheen (Estevez’s
real-life father), Estevez himself, Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher
(Mr. Demi Moore in real life), Christian Slater, Harry Belafonte,
Freddy Rodriguez (Rico on Six Feet
Under), Elijah Wood, and
Lindsay Lohan.
Estevez spins out these made-up stories on
one fateful day, June 4, in the tumultuous year of 1968.
Every Vietnam veteran knows what was going on in 1968: the
war was raging in Southeast Asia and the anti-war movement
had begun to pick up big-time steam back home. It was the
year of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the
riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and
the Tet Offensive. Bobby Kennedy was in the center of the
national political action on June 4, storming his way to
the Democratic presidential nomination based largely on his
uncompromising antiwar platform.
June 4 was the day of the
California primary and the night that Kennedy would appear
at the Ambassador Hotel to declare his victory. Estevez’s
characters wend their way through that day and night, leading
up to what we all know happened after midnight as Kennedy
made his way through the hotel’s
crowded, chaotic kitchen after his victory speech in the
hotel’s ballroom.
The war is integral to the movie.
Estevez makes good use of real wartime footage, including
grainy close-ups of GIs humping body bags onto waiting helicopters.
His many characters include two whose lives that day were
shaped immutably by the war: a young couple played by Wood
and Lohan. The two, who are little more than friends, decide
to get married June 4 at the hotel for one reason so that
young Wood will not go to Vietnam.
It’s unclear exactly how this marriage will get the
Wood character out of going to war. If he’s married,
the Lohan character tells another character, he wouldn’t
have to go to Vietnam; he would go to Germany. But that’s
not how it worked in 1968. There were plenty of married guys
in Vietnam. Plus, it’s not clear whether the character
portrayed by Wood is in the military or about to join or
get drafted. He has longish curly hair and long sideburns,
which would indicate he was a civilian.
As for Bobby as a
whole, it’s long gone from the theaters.
It should be out on DVD sometime soon. Rent it with the expectation
of being taken back to one fateful day in 1968 through the
vehicle of a high-minded but ultimately disappointing Hollywood
movie.
A THOUSAND WORDS
After the Fog,
a powerful 75-minute film that deals with the personal experiences
of a dozen war veterans, is made up exclusively of tightly
shot, talking-head interviews with veterans. Filmmaker Jay
Craven does not give the viewer a single war image. The unadorned
testimony of the veterans, though, imparts immediacy and
evokes the war and postwar experiences they relate.
The group
is made up of five World War II veterans, two veterans of
the Iraq War, and five Vietnam veterans: Dave Bressem, Wayne
Karlin, David Underwood, Dan Walsh, and George Williams.
All of the interviewees are well spoken. All of them have
faced the crucible of armed combat overseas, and all of their
lives have been profoundly affected by their war experiences.
Craven,
who teaches film at Marlboro College in Vermont, shows that
fighting in a war leaves a permanent mark on one’s
psyche. That’s true for
the veterans of all wars, including World War II, the so-called “good war.” It
was especially true for Vietnam veterans, who faced a deeply divided nation when
they returned home from an increasingly unpopular war.
And it is true for the
veterans of the current conflict, despite the fact that virtually
all Americans, whether they are in favor of the war or not,
support the troops. “I think
about [the war] every day,” says Abbie Pickett,
one of the two Iraq War veterans interviewed in the film.
Her words echo the thoughts of the eleven other veterans
in the film, who are one and two generations older.
After
the Fog was first shown last October at the Vermont International
Film Festival. It appeared on WGBH, the PBS station in Boston,
in November and will be screened at various venues in 2007.
For more information about the film, including its availability
on DVD, go to www.kingdomcounty.com/fog.html or call
802-592-3190.
SIXTIES
STAND
The Branson, Missouri, show # 1 Hits
of the 60’s bills itself
as “two
hours of high energy, non-stop singing and dancing featuring
12 of the finest singer/actor/dancers & musicians to
be found anywhere.” That live music-and-dancing
show, which includes a video tribute to Vietnam veterans,
has just produced a two-tune music CD, “STAND for the
Troops.” All of the profits from
the CD’s sales are going to VVA, along with the Armed
Forces Relief Fund, Operation Helmet, and the Branson Veterans
Task Force.
The CD contains lavish arrangements of the Nam
vet favorite, “We Gotta
Get Out of This Place,” along with Irving Berlin’s “God
Bless America,” and includes President Bush’s
thoughts on the bravery and dedication of American troops.
For more info, go to the web site www.standforthetroops.org which contains a page about VVA.
SEMPER FI MUSEUM
The National Museum of the U.S. Marine Corps
opened on November 10, the Marine Corps’ 231st birthday,
just outside the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia. Thousands
of visitors, a good many of them former Marines, were on
hand for the opening ceremonies for the first phase of the
$90 million, 118,000-square-foot museum, which is now open
to the public every day except Christmas.
When it is completed,
the museum will house thousands of artifacts, photographs,
and letters. Today, the museum is divided into separate galleries
that provide high-tech, multi-media, ultra-realistic exhibits
focusing on different wars. The Vietnam War exhibit is made
up of life-sized re-creations of individual Marines, tanks,
Jeeps, Vietnamese civilians, and a real CH-46 helicopter.
Visitors descend from the helicopter’s ramp into a
realistic tableau of Marines mounting a siege on a hill in
South Vietnam.
ARTS IN BRIEF
Bruce Weigl, the acclaimed poet who did a 1967-68
Vietnam War tour of duty as a U.S. Army infantryman, has
won his share of awards during his literary career, which
began in the late seventies. The latest: the $150,000 Lannan
Literary Award for Poetry. Wiegl, who teaches at Lorain County
Community College in his Ohio hometown, has written nine
books of poetry, including Song of
Napalm (1988). His other
awards include a Yaddo Foundation Fellowship, the Academy
of American Poets Prize, the Bread Loaf Fellowship in Poetry,
two Pushcart Prizes, and the VVA Excellence in the Arts Award
in 1987. Brian Turner, an Iraq war veteran and award-winning
poet, received one of the five 2006 Lannan Foundation Writing
Fellowships
On Veterans Day, four accomplished Vietnam War
veteran writers—Larry Heinemann,
Jack Fuller, Philip Caputo, and Robert Olen Butler—took
part in a roundtable discussion in Chicago on Nam lit. C-SPAN’s
Book TV covered the event, broadcast it December 23, and
will re-broadcast it in 2007. Check Book TV’s listings
because this was an exceptional discussion by four articulate,
informed, and opinionated men that ranged from the Vietnam
War to today’s conflict in
Iraq. All have received VVA Excellence in the Arts Awards.
Nicholas
Proffitt, the former Newsweek Vietnam War correspondent,
died November 10 of kidney cancer. He was 63 years old. Proffitt
is best known for his novel Gardens
of Stone (1983), which
is based on his pre-Vietnam War tour of duty with the Army’s
Honor Guard at Arlington National Cemetery, and later was
made into a Hollywood movie directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
His 1986 novel Embassy House dealt with CIA operations in
the Vietnam War.
Dr. Alex Moreano, an Albuquerque ear, nose,
and throat surgeon, went to Vietnam for several weeks in
2003 to volunteer at a hospital in Hue. His son, Keir Moreano,
has produced and directed As the Call,
So the Echo, a moving
documentary of his father’s humanitarian mission that
appeared on the film circuit scene last year and had a brief
run in movie theaters in New York in November. Future plans
include the possibility of showings on HBO or PBS and distribution
of a DVD. For more info, go to www.asthecall.com
The documentary
The Last Ghost of War, which deals with the legacy of Agent
Orange, is being considered for broadcast by PBS with the
support of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Producers
Janet Gardner and Pham Quoc Thai have asked VVA members who
have contacts with PBS to put in a good word about the film,
since it is extremely difficult to get documentaries of this
sort on the national PBS schedule. For more info about the
movie, go to www.gardnerdocgroup.com
Twyla Tharp continued
her good deeds for Vietnam veterans and for VVA last year
when she invited the VVA national staff to be her guests
at the opening night performance in early December of the
road show of Movin’ Out at the National
Theatre in Washington. The national tour of that rousing
show based on Billy Joel tunes and amazing Tharp-created
dancing (with a Vietnam War theme) finished a three-year
run in Birmingham, Alabama, on January 21. The tour received
the 2005 “Best New Musical” and “Best Choreography” Awards
from The League of American Theatres and Producers Touring
Broadway Awards.
Bruce Solheim, who teaches a Vietnam War
history class at Citrus College in Glendora, California,
has started a program at that institution called the Veteran’s
Fund to provide financial assistance to students who have
served in the military. “Citrus
College currently has over 400 student veterans, and that
number is likely to increase in the coming years,” Solheim
said. “Many of them have recently
returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with financial, psychological,
and physical challenges. We want to make their transition
to civilian life easier as a way of thanking them for their
service.”
You can add movie star Denzel Washington to
the list of celebs who have supported the newest generation
of veterans. Washington visited the Brooke Army Medical Center
in San Antonio in December 2004, took part in a Purple Heart
awarding ceremony, and toured the Fisher House facilities,
which house families of wounded veterans. Washington promised
to support the Fisher House program (although, he did not,
as the Internet rumor has it, “pull out his checkbook” and
write a big check on the spot). Washington did subsequently
write that big check and is now on the Fisher House Board
of Trustees. For a list of the officers and board of the
Fisher House, go to www.fisherhouse.org/aboutUs/board.shtml
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©2006-
2008, Vietnam Veterans of America. All Rights Reserved. 8605 Cameron
Street, Silver Spring, MD 20910