Brian De Palma is a playful, campy filmmaker; his best work involves him shifting tropes around like a magician with a shell game, making it impossible to guess where the plot, or the characters, or reality is going to end up. The joy of his movies—when they are a joy—is in the moviemaking and in the manipulation. His films are often serious and they can be heartfelt, but they aren’t sincere.
Given De Palma’s characteristic strengths, Casualties of War, an earnest war story and moral parable, seems like the absolute last film the director should’ve had anything to do with. After you watch it, though, you realize the first intuition was correct; this is a bad movie, made worse by the mismatch of director and material.
The 1989 film is based on a true story of American atrocities in Vietnam, originally reported by New Yorker journalist Daniel Lang. A patrol led by Sergeant Tony Meserve (Sean Penn) abduct a Vietnamese woman— Tran Thi Oanh (Thuy Thu Le) from her village. Four of the five men in the unit then rape and murder her. The one abstention is newly in-country private Max Eriksson, who’s moral and upright and played by Michael J. Fox.
Eriksson tries unsuccessfully to free the woman; then works determinedly to report his fellow soldiers and ensure they see justice. His commanding officers refuse to investigate, but eventually he finds a chaplain who’s able to force the army to listen, and the rapists are brought to justice.
In his study of Vietnam War films, Viet Thanh Nguyen efficiently eviscerates the story’s self-satisfied moralizing and blinkered insularity. “De Palma’s story is not about the Vietnamese at all,” Nguyen writes. “It is about American guilt only, played out over a poor victim. Oanh barely speaks, and when she does her words are not translated.” Her lack of a voice,” Nguyen says, “allows Americans to talk on her behalf. She and all the others like her are transformed into perpetual victims interchangeable with their traumas, visible to Americans only when they stimulate American guilt.”
This is a fairly standard approach for American Vietnam films; you could say much the same about Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, or any number of other colonizer guilt fests. What distinguishes Casualties of War isn’t the mechanism, but the painful incongruity of De Palma’s baroque meta-stylings, which squat incongruously on the war film like lingerie thrown on a pile of dung.
The background music is the most constant and intrusive example. De Palma likes big sweeping romantic intrusive musical cues. In his better films these flourishes heighten the artificiality of his narratives.
In Casualties, though, there’s no real sense of distance or camp, and so the dramatic music over the first firefight just functions as a jarringly straightforward effort to make the firefight seem dramatic. Similarly, the music’s insistent presence as the men confront each other or march the woman across the landscape feel like De Palma nudging you over and over again to remind you that this story is Important. Which given the grim context leads you to wonder if the director actually cares about the trauma and horror he’s depicting, or whether for him it’s just another big film gig.
The worst part of the movie is its conclusion. Most of Casualties is a flashback; Eriksson is remembering his Vietnam experiences on a train in the US. At the end of the runtime, we return to the 1980s, and Eriksson sees a young Vietnamese woman (also played by Thuy Thu Le) leave her scarf behind on her seat. He grabs it and returns it to her. She thanks him, intuits that she reminds him of someone else, and assures him that his bad dream/flashback is over. Eriksson, we are to understand, is absolved.
This scene, with its shuffling of identities and doubled characters, its collapse of past and present, its evocation of film as memory as dream, is very De Palma. But it’s a De Palma hemmed in by his own sententious moralizing and strait-laced Hollywood ending. The movie signals (in De Palma fashion) that it’s a fantasy. But instead of exploring the terrain of desire, perversion, power and disempowerment as De Palma does in his best films, the fantasy here is simply meant to deliver to Eriksson, and to the American viewer, assurances of their own virtue. The Vietnamese woman finally does speak, and all she can say is that she isn’t really herself, but is instead a conduit for the blandest, easiest reassurances possible.
De Palma is a clever filmmaker. But as Casualties of War shows, cleverness filtered through Hollywood self-righteousness and the wrong script can turn into the worst kind of glib horseshit.
