A Bright Shining Lie

While not in the same league as Go Tell The Spartans, which had the presence of Burt Lancaster if nothing else, this is a commendable effort to bring a huge and impressive piece of non-fiction to the screen.

Never shown in the cinema in the UK, my wife and I saw it on imported DVD. She was very impressed (having not read the book) and thought it conveyed something of the complexity of the subject very well and was very enlightening.

However, all hands do a credible job and it's worth watching. However, like most movies about Vietnam, it depressed me: the tragedy & the waste are almost overwhelming!

Neil Sheehan's masterpiece tells the Vietnam War story through a single biography. John Paul Vann was an American who overcame a humble background & made a distinctive, heroic career as a soldier, adding a beautiful wife & 3 kids along the way. Preparing for promotion to high rank, he went to Vietnam in the early 1960s as an adviser, one of the select few to take the fight against Communism right into combat. But Vann was also a man with deep personal issues: haunting, shaming memories of childhood poverty, a weak father & a libertine mother, leading perhaps to his own aggressive infidelities including one with an underaged girl that nearly led to court-martial. And his "fight" in Vietnam was merely a series of bureaucratic exercises in which the Americans were bogged down by South Vietnamese intrigues, both unwilling & unable to do what was necessary to defeat the Communists. Terry George explores this theme with the steady pace, methodical yet engrossing, that was later such a triumph in the remarkably similar "Hotel Rwanda." Paxton has his work cut out as the very complicated Vann, a dedicated soldier who is not only everything an Army officer should be, but also a true warrior whose devotion to victory trumps his loyalty to the establishment & thus even his own career. Yet Sheehan's Vann has a shocking capacity for self-harm, hating the ignominious background that was not his fault, indulging himself in sexual adventures that wounded his family & threatened his career as readily as he embarked on reckless combat missions. It's all Paxton's show & he takes us on a fascinating odyssey of an officer whose slow realization that the Army would rather lose the war by the book than win it by tossing away the book (it's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game?) causes him to leave the Army but, after a short, sad foray into business, return to Vietnam as a civilian administrator who steadily accumulates unique, vast military authority. Paxton's Vann wants to understand Vietnam's people & culture--but only enough to help him in his war effort--leading him to turn his back on his tormented family & take a Vietnamese wife (Wu). But for Vann, everything in his life is devoted to victory, a personal goal, an intense obsession, that he will achieve whether America or Vietnam like it or not. Paxton is suitably restrained, uttering no war cries like Stallone or Norris, making no personal journey of self-awareness or redemption as in "Apocalypse Now" or "Uncommon Valor." The professionalism of the art of war is his mantra, the belief that the everlasting principles of the true warrior will realize the high ideals of democracy & capitalism over the despair of communism. George doesn't give Paxton the opportunity to go too deeply into Vann's personal life (the book WAS very long, after all), so Vann comes across as a complex but not quite complete antihero. The other actors are there to help paint the Vann picture rather than those of their own characters. Madigan is very fine as Vann's loyal wife driven to despair as much by Vann's obsession with the abstract concept of victory as his gross infidelities. The superb Kurtwood Smith gives the best film portrayal of Westmoreland ever on screen--decisive, firm, unapproachable, unhearing--though he has only minutes to do it. Kay Tong Lim is as restrained as Paxton in depicting the clever Colonel Cao, Vann's ARVN partner & as self-serving as Vann is idealistic, who goes from being Vann's great hope to his frustration to his nemesis. The action scenes are low-budget & unremarkable, but audiences were long ago falsely conditioned to view Vietnam as a series of either personal or spectacular cowboy-vs-Indian fights. Vann's presentations for Pentagon & White House big-shots, in which he dramatically holds up handfuls of rice to underscore the importance of winning over Vietnam's farmers, are far more poignant. If the Vann of Sheehan, George & Paxton has a valediction, it's that the war was lost in Washington, not in the field--a view that's hardly original but is still very hard to wrap one's mind around. Many viewers will find "A Bright, Shining Lie" quite unsatisfying entertainment, but that's the problem with dramatizing nonfiction, the risk of presenting a story that's trying to teach. But, if it tries to teach, it doesn't try to preach, and at least the sun doesn't set in the East.

For a TV Movie, this film was good. The film didn't look amateurish and the overall quality was generally very good. One scene that especially stood out was when Bill Paxton rushed to the village only to see it get destroyed. However, this movie could have been much better. The most critical error of this movie is that it tries to cover too many elements and ultimately fails to fully address them to any satisfying extent. It lacked focus. There were a lot of good ideas, such as the hidden propaganda, the conflict of war strategy of various people, the familial problems, to the questionable moral and ethical values of the main character..., but most of them were dealt with not more than a dozen lines! In short, this movie needed to be more developed and needed another revision before it was released.

The movie showed it like it really was. I did not know Vann, but two Colonels that I know did work with him. It shows who really ran the war in Vietnam. It shows Westmoreland for what he was too. The best part is that it shows how the Military had little or no say in conducting the war. It lets us see that it was a political war and that maybe it could have had a different outcome if it had been pursued correctly. The action is good, and it is authentic. Paxton is intense. His performance is often complimented on that he could have actually been Vann. Or that he could actually have been in a war. TYhe battle sequences are realistic without being overly bloody. The dialog was well presented and was mostly believable.