Ill-Informed Gadfly

In 1990, at age 43, Oliver Stone won an Academy Award for Best Director for “Born on the Fourth of July.” It was his second such honor, following his win three years earlier, for “Platoon.” Stone became the 16th man to receive more than one directing Oscar; Steven Spielberg and Clint Eastwood have since joined the exclusive club, which also includes such luminaries as Billy Wilder, David Lean, Elia Kazan and Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Stone’s vanquished foes that year were also impressive. He defeated Jim Sheridan, for the lyrical “My Left Foot”; Woody Allen for one of his best movies, “Crimes and Misdemeanors”; Peter Weir for the well-crafted if cloying “Dead Poets Society”; and Kenneth Branagh for “Henry V,” arguably the best Shakespearean film ever made.

The previous year, 1989, had been a great one for movies. In addition to Sheridan’s, Allen’s and Branagh’s films, it was the year of “Do the Right Thing,” “Casualties of War,” “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover,” “Drugstore Cowboy,” “Enemies, A Love Story,” “sex, lies and videotape,” “Batman,” “Say Anything,” “Heathers,” “The Abyss” and “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.”

Most of these movies have secured their place in the film-historical firmament, either as bold artistic statements or superior popular entertainments. (”Enemies” is sadly overlooked, and “Munchausen” is more of a personal obsession.) I can’t gauge, exactly, how the reputation of “Born on the Fourth of July” has held up over the years, but I think just listing it alongside these titles makes it look wobbly. To be fair, Stone’s movie is more than just a shallow awards-grabber: It’s personal and passionate. It’s also shrill and histrionic, showy and uneven. Stone and his star, Tom Cruise, try to tell an epic tale of American heroism and political awakening. But they’re so busy insisting on Ron Kovic as an iconic figure that they lose sight of the gritty details that would create a fuller, more rounded portrait. A small example that speaks to their approach: Cruise, no whiz at accents, attempts some understated Long Island inflections. When he speaks softly, he gives Kovic a distinct voice, with a sensitive, boyish lilt that suggests the uncertainty behind his gung-ho patriotism. But much of the dialogue in “Born on the Fourth of July” is SHOUTED, and when Cruise yells, he just sounds like Cruise.

The outline of the plot is well known: After high school, young Kovic joins the Marines and volunteers to serve in Vietnam; during his second tour, a gunshot severs his spine, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down. Eventually Kovic comes to terms with his disability and becomes a prominent voice in the antiwar movement. I’m not sure, though, that Stone is really interested in the specifics of Kovic’s physical and emotional journey. He positions Kovic as a symbol of everything wrong about the war in Vietnam. Kovic develops remarkable dexterity and independence — traveling solo across the country and to Mexico. Yet to Stone, Kovic’s wheelchair is a prison, a constant reminder of his shattered manhood. Stone is obsessed with the sexual side effects of paralysis, and I imagine this movie has contributed to the misconception — corrected by the documentary “Murderball” — that men with spinal cord injuries can’t get erections. In this respect, Kovic was simply unlucky. Stone’s limp-dick fixation reaches a nadir when Kovic antagonizes his devout-Catholic mother by shouting “PENIS! BIG ERECT PENIS!” She responds, “Don’t say penis in this house!” Stone and Kovic himself adapted the screenplay from Kovic’s autobiography, but I don’t care if Kovic remembers this exchange verbatim; on screen, I didn’t believe it.

So much of the talk in “Born on the Fourth of July” is fraught with Meaning. Scenes are framed not as conversations but as political arguments. Stone struggles to convey the reversal in Kovic’s convictions through action. The third act feels rushed and incomplete: After confessing to the family of a fallen comrade about the young man’s friendly-fire death, Kovic abruptly transforms into a full-blown antiwar activist.

As Stone’s filmmaking, well, I often say that actors win Oscars not for the best acting, but for the most acting. The same goes for Stone, whose showy, subjective camerawork is sometimes spot-on, sometimes distracting. The chaotic, hallucinatory combat sequences include some of his best work, as Stone and the peerless cinematographer Robert Richardson manipulate light to show how “the fog of war” clouds the vision and judgment of a terrified grunt. Stone also fashions an underfunded veterans’ hospital into a chamber of horrors. But often he’s just whirling the camera around, using slow motion and sound effects and extreme closeups and shifts in film stock as unnecessary italics. It’s frenzied, immature filmmaking. (Compare it to the restraint shown by Brian De Palma, often unjustly criticized for his visual excesses, in “Casualties of War,” one of the great Vietnam films.) Two years later, in “JFK,” Stone would find the perfect material for his techical gifts and high-octane style. Wrong as the premise was, the process of unraveling a conspiracy galvanized Stone to do his best work; he captured the outrage of so many who feel the story of Kennedy’s assassination was never fully told. Stone was nominated for a third Oscar for “JFK” but didn’t win — too outlandish and incendiary. Looking back now, though, it’s almost impossible to believe that by then, he was already film royalty in the Academy’s eyes, thanks to his whiz-bang-boom veteran’s story.