director/producer
Stanley Kubrick
screenwriters
Stanley
Kubrick
Michael Herr
Gustav Hasford
based on
the book The Short Timers by
Gustav
Hasford
cinematographer
Douglas Milsome
music
Vivian Kubrick
editor
Martin Hunter
cast
Matthew Modine (Pvt. Joker)
Adam Baldwin (Animal Mother)
Vincent D'Onofrio (Pvt. Pyle)
R. Lee Ermey (Gunnery Sgt. Hartman)
Dorian Harewood (Eightball)
Kevyn Major Howard (Rafterman)
Arliss Howard (Pvt. Cowboy)
Ed O'Ross (Lt. Touchdown)
John Terry (Lt. Lockhart)
Peter Edmund (Snowball)
Ngoc Le (Vietcong Sniper)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 116m
u.s.
release: 6/26/87
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other stanley
kubrick films
reviewed on this website:
- eyes
wide shut
see also:
- kubrick:
the films, 1955-1999
- eyes
wide shut: the DVD review
|
Somewhere near the middle of
Full Metal Jacket, the sardonic protagonist Private Joker
(Matthew Modine) is asked by a disdainful colonel why he wears
a peace symbol on his flak jacket and has "Born to
Kill" written on his helmet. Joker's answer? "I think
I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man."
This detail is not unimportant: Full Metal Jacket and
almost everyone in it are split right down the middle. The movie
is formally split: Its first half unfolds at Parris Island,
where clueless "maggots" are hammered on the anvil
of military training until they are forged into human weapons;
its second half is set before and after the Tet Offensive in
Vietnam, where many of the bits of business in the first half
pay off. Stanley Kubrick didn't just make a war movie; he made
a philosophical inquiry into the birth of killers -- which is
presented here as man coming to grips with the Jungian Shadow.
If that makes Full Metal
Jacket sound stodgy and dull, it certainly isn't. Kubrick
was an entertainer as well as an artist, and the film's first
section comes as close to pure comedy as his double whammy of
Lolita and Dr. Strangelove in the '60s. Indeed,
much of the movie reads as a bizarre conflation of those earlier
classics: sex and violence, violence as sex. "This is my
rifle, this is my gun," the recruits' drill sergeant Hartman
(Lee Ermey) bellows, grabbing his crotch on the word "gun";
"This is for fighting, this is for fun," the maggots
call back. The recruits are trained to embrace the permanent
hard-on of a rifle: As long as you are a Marine with a gun, you
will never be flaccid. The homoerotic tone of the training sequences
is also unmistakable. Lined up with shaved heads, the recruits
look like stiff dicks, with Hartman always shoving his loudly
open mouth into their faces. The entire experience seems driven
by a violent terror of homosexuality and femininity, in this
spotless white place where young men sleep in close quarters,
shower together, shit together.
Lee Ermey has given subtler
performances since (he was nicely quiet in Dead
Man Walking and Seven),
but his relentlessly antagonistic turn as Sgt. Hartman gave him
instant cult status he dines out on to this day (hosting the
military show Mail Call, presiding over talking-doll replicas
of himself). Hartman is a clown, but a clown who bites. His initial
browbeating of the pathetic Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio), who can't
keep from smirking at the drill instructor's elaborate invective,
is hideously funny because we wouldn't be able to keep
a straight face either. Then Hartman cuts Pyle's laughter off
(along with his oxygen), and ours, too. Under Hartman's pitiless
tutelage, Pyle gradually becomes a competent recruit but also
subhuman. The implication is that this is the obvious trade-off,
though others in the same batch of recruits -- Joker and his
buddy Cowboy (Arliss Howard) -- manage some intellectual detachment
from the process and retain some humanity. Pyle doesn't; he becomes
what the Marine Corps wants -- a perfect sociopath "married
to his piece."
After the first section --
a prologue promoted to Side A of an album -- the movie becomes
anecdotal, with analogues of the boot-camp characters popping
up everywhere. Nobody in Vietnam is as dominant as Hartman, but
we're given a rather lackadaisical authority figure, a lieutenant
who edits Stars and Stripes and sends reporter Joker off
to cover Tet with cheesedick photographer Rafterman (Kevyn Major
Howard) in tow. Kubrick plays with military language here --
a new directive encourages reporters to replace "search
and destroy" with "sweep and clear" ("Very
catchy," snarks Joker). Pauline Kael's review complained
that the Marines' "language is inert," but the dialogue
here is another instance of Kubrick's fascination with "phatic
speech" -- verbiage with no content. A lot of the dialogue
is just callow boasting, especially when Joker meets Pyle's Vietnam
twin, Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin), and pretty much distrusts
him on sight. (The brutal Animal Mother, who resembles a harder
Pyle, is what Pyle might have become if he had survived the Island.)
Full Metal Jacket gathers tension in a cruelly mathemetical
sequence foreshadowed by Hartman's earlier praise of infamous
Marine-trained snipers -- Whitman, Oswald -- who showed what
one motivated Marine and his rifle could do. The platoon has
made a wrong turn; acting doesn't get any finer than Arliss Howard
and Dorian Harewood (as the ironic Eightball) looking at a map
and realizing how far off they are. One by one, men scamper over
the treacherous rubble of Hue and get picked off ignominiously.
Kubrick summons up whispers of the uncanny here, as if the god
of war himself is reaching down and unplugging these robots of
combat. There is a face-off mirroring the final one between Joker
and Pyle, only this time Joker does not "hesitate in the
moment of truth."
Coming as it did after Oliver
Stone's Platoon, and after seven years of silence from
Kubrick himself, Full Metal Jacket couldn't help but disappoint
critics, none of whom really seemed to get it. Some turned
to Gustav Hasford's more emotionally transparent source novel,
castigating Kubrick for yet another icy view of humanity. Kubrick,
it was said, painted portraits of inhumanity by denying his characters
their humanity. But there is humanity here, though not the sort
we generally like to face. It is humanity as flawed system
-- the faulty meat run through the grinder of war. Hartman reigns
over his enclosed kingdom of recruits, but he's not getting them
ready for war. He's getting them ready for death.
|
