Old War Stories for a New War
"Operation Homecoming," directed by former ABC newsman Richard Robbins, comes to us as a product of the National Endowment for the Arts, which, under chairman Dana Gioia, must have thought it would be both patriotic and artistic to have soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan try their hand at creative writing to express what they saw and felt there. Whatever the wisdom of the original idea, there are some problems with converting the product of these labors into a movie that is essentially a collection of talking heads with illustrations.
Sometimes the illustrations are montages of still photos, or file footage of soldiers marching or relaxing or fighting. Sometimes they are drawings. In one case they are shots of the cemetery where a dead Marine's funeral will take place or already has taken place, though not of the funeral itself.
Sometimes the talking heads are invisible, as when such actors as Robert Duvall, Beau Bridges, or Aaron Eckhart read the writings of the guys who are on camera. But always it's the words, the "writing," that holds the center stage.
There is a kind of inertness to the whole idea of "writing," which is only accentuated by the fact that you can't help noticing what's missing, which is the political context of the war. So much retold suffering means that "Operation Homecoming," which begins a one-week run tonight at Film Forum, constantly teeters on the brink of being antiwar, but it never allows itself to tip over in that direction - which must have been the price of winning the cooperation of both the NEA and the Pentagon.
Yet on the whole, I would have preferred if someone had been allowed to say what many must be thinking, namely that all the suffering on display, both physical and psychic, is unnecessary. That's the usual subtext in similar accounts of the horror of war: To make it go away, all you have to do is not fight. This is pacifist wishful thinking, but at least, if someone had said it, someone else might have said the opposite - that these are necessary sacrifices.
That notion is also left out. One of the talking heads, Sergeant John McCary, does say that we have to keep faith with the fallen by seeing the thing through to the end, but it's not clear that that's the same thing. Others who must be against seeing it through to the end are forced to be less direct about it.
The result looks more like a commercial than a conventional documentary: a commercial, perhaps, for the humanity and the compassion and the sensitivity of those whom some of us might otherwise — it is more than hinted — be tempted to think of as unfeeling brutes and killing machines.
As I did not need to be persuaded that American soldiers are proper human beings with the full complement of finer feelings, I occasionally found myself getting a bit impatient with the film.
I had already heard, too, and more than once, that soldiers in combat are both terribly afraid and terribly exhilarated; that they feel very keenly grief at the deaths of their comrades and remorse when they are responsible for civilian deaths; that they experience both mind-numbing boredom and heart-piercing terror and that they fight more for one another, and to be allowed to go home, than they do for abstract ideas like freedom and democracy.
Above all, I have heard again and again that in battle, men just naturally revert to a form of savagery. "So much for honor and fair play; so much for the ancient warrior codes. Die, m--------, die!" It's not that I doubt any of these things; it just might have been nice to hear somebody speak up for honor and fair play for a change.
As it is, the uniform and complementary nature of the viewpoints gives the film a kind of ritual function, as we listen to familiar ideas repeated over and over. The point is not to receive information from the soldiers but to pay our respects to the sacrifices of all soldiers as we listen to some of them try to make sense of their experience of war by telling how they felt about it at the time.
It's no more news than the liturgy is in church, but there is some value in listening to it anyway. Also like the liturgy, the war narrative is dressed up in fine language. One turn of phrase I particularly liked was: "I been at the beach now for a week, and I can't find the ocean."
It's the nearest thing we get to a joke, and it made me realize that black humor is the other thing missing here. Once again, a reverent hush descends on the proceedings. Not that I'm complaining. As someone in "Operation Homecoming" says: "There's a false notion that we all ought to recover from everything ... There's something to be said for remembering and not healing."
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