Platoon

 

Platoon (1986)

Dir. Oliver Stone

Written by Oliver Stone

Starring Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe

 

This year, for no reason at all, I thought it would be interesting to revisit the filmography of Oliver Stone, a –shall we say controversial?—artist who throughout a lengthy and extremely productive career (he averaged two films a year for almost a decade in the late 80’s and early 90s! Albert Pyun could barely keep up with him!) has been alternately (and sometimes  simultaneously) glorified and reviled, hailed as the savior of cinema and the destroyer of it, called a shameless liar and a bold truth-teller, achieved spectacular commercial success and resounding box-office failure, been a humorless didact, a shameless provocateur, and a feckless showman, tackled subjects which range from ripped-from-the-headlines topicalism to classical antiquity to, um, football. And, most importantly, cast John C. McGinley is a whole shitload of movies. In recent decades he seems to have drifted into the wilderness a little, making a series of films which didn’t really seem to connect with audiences, becoming something of a dubious pro-Kremlin propagandist, and obsessively re-editing and re-releasing his 2004 epic ALEXANDER. But man, for a full decade between 1986 and 1996, the guy was absolutely untouchable, cranking out cinema which, whatever else you can say about it, is as fiery and passionate and ambitious as any mainstream filmmaker has ever attempted.

 

I reviewed his 2012 film SAVAGES when it came out, and took a look at his first studio film, THE HAND the next year (his directorial debut was 1981’s SEIZURE; after that he spent several years as a screenwriter, notching MIDNIGHT EXPRESS, CONAN THE BARBAIRAN, SCARFACE, and YEAR OF THE DRAGON before SALVADOR hit the screen in March 1986). But even though it marked his fourth film as a director and ninth film as a writer, I think it would be folly to begin anywhere but with his second movie which came out in 1986 (actually his third as a writer, since he’s credited as a co-writer on EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE). While SALVADOR beat it to theaters, it was PLATOON that shot to the top of the box office (its $136 million domestic gross made it the third-biggest film that year, trailing TOP GUN and, um, CROCODILE DUNDEE, and all that on a miniscule $6 million budget) and made Oliver Stone not just a household name, but a inarguable American auteur.

 

PLATOON was an incomparably perfect vehicle for Stone's strengths primarily because of its simplicity; unlike SALVADOR, which gets bogged down a bit in explaining the shifty mechanics of Latin American politics and US intelligence, PLATOON correctly assumes we already have all the context we need to understand the Vietnam war and be against it, and consequently focuses all its attention on communicating the subjective experience of being there, in it. Since Stone was “in it,” (just like the film’s protagonist, he dropped out of an ivy-league college in 1967 and enlisted in the US Army, specifically requesting combat duty in Vietnam, where he was wounded in action twice) he is enormously effective at cultivating a mountain of tiny details that feel authentic and meaningful and help make for an immersive, textured film about an experience which feels deeply truthful even when it's absolutely wild and histrionic a lot of the time.*

 

He is helped enormously by his cast, a veritable who's-who list of guys** who would become beloved character actors (Forrest Whitaker, Keith David, John C. McGinley, Tony Todd, Johnny Depp) and especially by Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger, both of whom bring a tremendous amount of specificity and personality to their two opposing characters who on the page probably read more like symbols (and opposing father-figures) than humans; Dafoe brings a touch of sardonic, mischievous danger to a character who might otherwise seem like a bland white knight, and Berenger brings a hint of existential pain to his sadistic villain, as though he genuinely regrets that the world has made him what he is. This allows us to believe and invest in the characters enough to make even the most outlandish, operatic drama hit hard rather than feel overblown and silly like it maybe ought to (see: the film's poster).

 

The movie also benefits in a way it would be difficult to overstate from the superb editing by Claire Simpson (who rightly won the Oscar for it) which is so astoundingly ahead-of-its time that the movie feels startlingly modern even in 2021. Well, except that today's version of this type of chaotic editing would miss entirely the storytelling precision Simpson displays here, and would be shot like shaky dogshit as opposed to the careful, unshowy mastery we get from Robert Richardson (he didn't get his Oscar for this one, but would end up snagging it for JFK, which is even more honorable). Simpson (who, like Richardson, had already worked with Stone on SALVADOR***) would go on to only one more film with Stone (the next year’s WALL STREET), but she would mentor her replacements (Pietro Scalia, David Brenner, Joe Hutshing and Julie Monroe, all of whom would enjoy multi-film tenures as editors on Stone’s films) and contribute immeasurably to the aggressive, borderline avant-garde editing style which would later come to define Stone’s work. But Richardson would stick with Stone for more than a decade, becoming the cinematographer on every one of his films up to 1997’s U-TURN. Between the three of them, Vietnam turns into something overstimulating and overwhelming, perfectly capturing the characters’ subjective reality through their simultaneously exhaustion-stunted and adrenaline-amped consciousness. And the genius is, this is all done without the movie feeling it necessary to make explicit that this is subjective on some meta-level: it just presents this as reality, because the movie is how we enter the world of these characters, so of course it's subjective. Proof that right from the start, Stone and his collaborators understood that in art, emotional truth is the only kind of reality that matters.

 

Still, there are perceptible traces of a filmmaker still finding his feet. Despite across-the-board excellent performances from the rest of the cast, Charlie Sheen (MAJOR LEAGUE) is fine as a blank audience surrogate, but brings very little to the role in a movie which is otherwise packed to the brim with personality. You could argue that it's important for this particular film to have a steadier performance holding the center while the craziness revolves around it, but you can be steady without being bland, and Sheen definitely tends towards the latter rather than the former. He also really struggles with the admittedly ludicrously overwritten voice-over narration, which is the one element of the film which is overblown in a way which feels cheesy, rather than heightened. Stone’s strength as a conjuror of intense subjective experience (and his dream-team of cinematic collaborators) is already present and accounted for here – unmissable, even. But perhaps he didn’t quite have the confidence yet to simply show, rather than tell, and his inability to get more out of Sheen (and his -perhaps consequent-- reliance on voice-over narration) are the one obvious sign that he still had room to grow.

 

Even so, the overall film is so focused and potent that few other war movies have ever been able to touch it. If the world had missed SALVADOR, they couldn’t ignore this kind of powerhouse. This was indisputably the work of a genuine capital-v Voice. You can quibble about the corny narration or its somewhat myopic foregrounding of Stone’s own perspective, but you can’t argue about its raw potency. It's a masterpiece by one of cinema's most ferocious auteurs, and whatever little caveats I have about this or that pale in the face of its righteous fury.

 

* Near the end, there's literally a shot where Tom Berenger has devil eyes, similar to the amazing deleted scene from NIXON which I just watched again to be sure and holy goddam, if that scene had played in theaters I am convinced it would have caused the movie DEMONS to happen for real. That shit melts steel beams.

** And it's all guys; I don't think there's a single English-language speaking part for a woman, which is just as well considering female characterization is not generally Stone's strong suit.

*** Which was only her second theatrical film after her debut as editor in… holy cow, C.H.U.D.!

Appendix A: Oliver Stone Studies
+PLATOON (1986)
+SALVADOR (1986)
+8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE (1986)
+WALL STREET (1987)
+TALK RADIO (1988)
+BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY(1989)
+THE DOORS(1991)
+JFK (1991)
+ HEAVEN & EARTH (1993)