director
Rob Reiner
screenwriter
Aaron Sorkin
based on
his play
producers
David Brown
Rob Reiner
Andrew Scheinman
cinematographer
Robert Richardson
music
Marc Shaiman
editor
Robert Leighton
cast
Tom Cruise (Daniel Kaffee)
Jack Nicholson (Nathan R. Jessep)
Demi Moore (JoAnne Galloway)
Kevin Bacon (Ross)
Kiefer Sutherland (Kendrick)
Kevin Pollak (Sam Weinberg)
James Marshall (Downey)
J.T. Walsh (Markinson)
Christopher Guest (Stone)
J.A. Preston (Judge Randolph)
Matt Craven (Spradling)
Wolfgang Bodison (Dawson)
Xander Berkeley (Whitaker)
Noah Wyle (Barnes)
Cuba Gooding Jr. (Hammaker)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 138m
u.s.
release: December 11,
1992
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
|
A
Few Good Men is a real
crowd-pleaser; then again, so was Hitler. Directed by Rob Reiner
from a script Aaron Sorkin adapted from his own shrewd, popular
play, the movie is generally nothing more than a fancy, prestigious
version of Top Gun, Days of Thunder, or the Tom
Cruise redemption film of your choice. It's a very lucrative
rut Cruise has dug for himself, and here he is, once again, as
the cocky jerk who learns to discipline himself and show his
true grit. This time he's called Daniel Kaffee, a Navy lawyer
assigned to defend two Marines charged with the murder of another
Marine. Kaffee, of course, is too inexperienced and egotistical
for the case; the drama is less about the outcome of the case
than about the outcome of Kaffee's maturity. Cruise owns this
character template, perhaps because by now it's so threadbare
no one else wants it.
A Few Good Men begins well, with a Marine exercise that
has such exaggerated, choreographed snap it's funny. It's also
about the only sign of the witty Rob Reiner -- remember him?
-- who made This Is Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride.
I admire Reiner's desire to work in many different genres, but
this is a disheartening departure. He brings nothing of himself
to the proceedings; anyone could have turned the camera on and
off. The film, as it progresses, begins to seem like Reiner's
own military exercise -- all professional polish, no soul. A
gifted director, Reiner does goose some surface excitement out
of material that is primarily talk, talk, talk. I could say this
is the best A Few Good Men that could be made. But that's
not saying much.
The Marines Kaffee is defending, we're told, are not monsters
but just two none-too-bright jarheads acting on orders from their
commanding officer at Guantanamo Bay -- Colonel Nathan Jessep
(Jack Nicholson), a paranoid warhorse who thinks that bullying
and hazing exercises teach weak Marines the value of discipline.
As a metaphor for the way the military necessarily coarsens its
soldiers by exalting love of country over love of human life,
this isn't bad, but the movie barely explores it. You get the
idea that the Navy (represented by Kaffee and his two non-entity
assistants, Demi Moore and Kevin Pollak) is Good, and the Marines
(represented by Jessep, the two jarheads, and scary Jesus freak
Kiefer Sutherland) are Bad. It's amusing at first, and then a
little nauseating, how the film tries to play it both ways.
As the close-cropped, casually vile Jessep, Jack Nicholson does
for this movie what Robin Williams did for Aladdin --
his outlaw charisma makes up for the beautiful, boring people
at the story's center. Nicholson can still put a wicked spin
on any dialogue -- the way he inflects "Don't I feel
like the fuckin' asshole" gets the film's biggest laugh
-- and he gets to deliver an entertainingly scandalous routine
about how grand it was to screw a woman who outranked him. Yet
despite Nicholson's showboat turn, Jessep is essentially a liberal
cartoon of a military ogre. In each of his three scenes, Jessep
devolves further and further, until finally, in the courtroom
climax, he lunges at Kaffee like Robert De Niro's Al Capone in
The Untouchables. This man is about as believable in real
life as Williams' Genie would be.
What's truly odd about A Few Good Men is that it asks
us to forgive the two Marines for killing a helpless kid. Yeah,
they were only following orders -- tell that to the dead kid.
(The Nazis said that in their own defense, too.) A Few Good
Men asks us to applaud the vindication of two moral idiots
who are never presented as anything more than dehumanized robots
out of a Kubrick film. The movie seems to say, It's a shame that
Marine died, but we have bigger fish to fry -- the bigger fish
supposedly being the callous ethos that turns some young men
into hardened weapons of war and destroys others. But the fish
turns out to be a caricatured straw man in the person of the
snorting Jessep, a target for easy shots. This lets us off the
hook; since the heroes are also military people, we don't have
to feel like leftist peaceniks -- horrid thought, isn't it? --
to enjoy seeing the Marines exposed. The acclaim and Oscar buzz
for A Few Good Men are bewildering. Perhaps audiences
and critics prefer a simplistic drama in which the complex dynamic
between the military and those it supposedly protects can be
boiled down to the clash between the Top Gun and the Joker. |
