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.

The ordinary trajectory in a film like this during times like these is for Vann, like Philip Caputo, Ron Kowalsky and numerous other figures before him, to enter the service on the verge of exploding with patriotism, idealism, and gung-ho-ness, then to learn that the Vietnamese war was a big mistake as he is turned around by the events he witnesses. Kind of like what happens to David Janssen in "The Green Berets," only in reverse. Not so here. This is a complex and admirable story of a complex and not entirely admirable man. He is sent to Vietnam as a Lt. Colonel, bursting with enthusiasm and with his eye on promotions, true, but he does not undergo an epiphany in which God or the Buddha appears shaking a finger at him. He wants to win the war but feels it's being fought inefficiently. We need to coopt the communist revolution by getting rid of the corrupt and cowardly Vietnamese officers and giving the rice back to the peasants or something like that. He makes his views known to the press and is more or less forced to resign his commission. (The story is a bit murky on this point.) After a few years' dry spell at home he is called back to Vietnam as some sort of civilian advisor who now wears the two stars of a general and issues military orders. He has not lost his enthusiasm or his idealism and comes to believe that we can now win the war by conventional means, even after Tet. He orchestrates a heroic victory over the North Vietnamese army, then his career ends, as does his life. That's not what I would call the usual ten-cent trajectory in character development. It isn't nearly linear enough. And in that nonlinearity it resembles life more than it does fiction. Is Vann a hero? Undoubtedly. Is he a good man? Well -- yes and no. After his marriage (to the character played by Amy Madigan) he sleeps with the 15-year-old babysitter. In Vietnam he evidently lies to a beautiful young woman he seduces and tells her he's separated from his wife. On his return to Vietnam he looks up the girl again. She seems just as gorgeous, at least to these eyes, but she's changed her hair or something so he avoids her. Instead he takes up with a schoolgirl and gets her pregnant. When confronted with his self-evident guilt by the girl's father, he marries her. On the other hand, he doesn't smoke or drink. There is an attempt to account for his misbehavior by means of some half-hearted palaver about how his mother was a whore. He was an illegitimate child and blames this status for keeping him out of West Point and getting him booted out of the army. The film betrays itself here if the writers and producers really meant to put forward this information as a pat explanation of his various failures, but if they meant it mainly as the way the protagonist attempts to justify God's ways to Vann, they hit the nail on the head. (Sure I'm flawed. Wouldn't you be, with a mother like mine?) The combat scenes are pretty effective, and so is Ed Lauter, playing a sympathetic guy for a change. Too bad the leads aren't. Whatever "charisma" means, Bill Paxton as Vann doesn't have it, though he looks the part; and the reporter from the New York Times, with whom Vann has a falling out, generates a rather large hole whenever he is on screen. The girls are indescribably delicious. Neil Sheehan, on whose book this story was based, has a tendency to stretch for drama and characters that aren't there. His earlier book could not turn the Captain of the USS Vance into Queeg. But judging from this film, he has presented a more complicated picture of a man here, a more adult portrait, warts and all. All together, the time spent watching this movie is well spent. I'm not sure how close I would like to get to a man who didn't smoke or drink and who called down artillery fire on his own position but it's fascinating to know something about him at this remove.

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 Vietnam experience seen through the eyes of an officer average american with family back home and the good intentions, often rebuffed, that are frustatingly hard to put in place. After "Good Morning Vietnam", which was a non-combat movie about Americans in Vietnam, this one comes close in describing what Americans felt in the war. This movie, however, is still a combat war movie, but sprinkled with family and personal issues, presented straight forward and down to earth. Produced by HBO, it is surprisingly a good production, with good acting.

I liked this motion picture. The work done in preparation and the use of documentary style presentation was effective, and gave the movie and story credibility. The acting was good. The part of Mary Jane was especially good, given the limited amount of screen time. Amy Madigan seems to have a knack to play the angry housewife/mother. She is GOOD at it. Just enough, not too much, just right! Bill Paxton did a believable job as lead character. The story itself is one that needs to be told over and over again, until the American people get the message of truth and LIES surrounding Viet Nam.