director
Ridley Scott
screenwriters
David Twohy
Danielle Alexandra
story by
Danielle Alexandra
producers
Roger Birnbaum
Demi Moore
Ridley Scott
Suzanne Todd
cinematographer
Hugh Johnson
music
Trevor Jones
editor
Pietro Scalia
cast
Demi Moore (Jordan O'Neil)
Viggo Mortensen (Urgayle)
Anne Bancroft (Senator DeHaven)
Jason Beghe (Royce)
Daniel von Bargen (Hayes)
John Michael Higgins (Chief of Staff)
Kevin Gage (Pyro)
David Warshofsky (Instructor Johns)
Morris Chestnut (McCool)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 124m
u.s.
release: 8/22/97
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other ridley
scott films
reviewed on this website:
- black
hawk down
- blade
runner
- gladiator
- hannibal
|
By
a happy coincidence, I finally got around to seeing G.I. Jane
the same day I started reading a book by Rene Denfeld, the controversial
author of two postfeminist works: The New Victorians,
which challenges the modern feminist orthodoxy that defines women
as victims of men; and, more germane to this review, Kill
the Body, the Head Will Fall, an account of Denfeld's training
as a boxer and a study of female aggression and violence. An
incisive and provocative thinker, Denfeld would have been the
ideal choice to write G.I. Jane, and I wish to God she
had.
G.I. Jane is a rabid piece of militaristic pulp with a
crucial and commercially shrewd difference: The hero, the soft
clay to be molded into a steely instrument of death, is a woman
-- Demi Moore, of course. Moore is Lt. Jordan O'Neil (a carefully
androgynous name), a smart but frustrated officer handpicked
to undergo the harshest military training in the world -- in
the Navy SEALs, which boast (and that's a good word for it) a
60 percent drop-out rate. Will a woman have the right stuff?
Or will she fail and set feminism back decades?
Well, we're talking about an expensive Hollywood movie co-produced
by its star, so the question is never whether Jordan will
make it; it's how she'll make it, and what kinds of highly
fetishized punishment we can watch her endure on the road to
self-fulfillment. G.I. Jane was directed by Ridley Scott,
a sometimes great stylist (Alien, Blade
Runner, the similarly op-ed-worthy Thelma & Louise)
who often sacrifices substance to style. Scott turns G.I.
Jane into a heavy-breathing pictorial ordeal, an essay in
eroticized brutality and masochism. A certain part of the audience
may enjoy seeing Demi Moore shaved and beaten and degraded, and
Scott gives them that and more. If not for its flimsy "feminist"
pose, the movie would be denounced as violently misogynistic.
G.I. Jane -- a stupid title befitting a stupid film --
is the sort of Nietzschean service drama I thought Full Metal
Jacket had bagged and tagged ten years ago. Stanley Kubrick's
chilly masterpiece told the truth about military training: that
it isn't remotely "good for building character," that
it grinds up human meat and spits out war machines. As Jordan
transforms into an ass-kicking iron butterfly, the self-actualizing
spectacle becomes absurd. For centuries we've gotten the coded
message that men must be brutal to be real men. The message is
no less repulsive when applied to women. Jordan says her ordeal
is her choice, but what is she choosing? To be cannon fodder
in a war that improves politicians' approval polls?
Since the movie introduces a duplicitous senator (Anne Bancroft)
who selects Jordan and then betrays her, I expected Jordan to
see through the bullshit. But no, she stays true to her unit
-- a good cog in the machine. She blossoms under the cruel tutelage
of the baroquely named Master Chief Urgayle (Viggo Mortensen,
whose witty and sinister portrait of sadism is the movie's saving
grace); she gets to prove herself in a real-life battle that
I found unwatchable -- Scott fractures the action with jittery
zooms that had me wishing for Dramamine. By the end, the message
is clear: to be a real woman, you have to become an animal. I
eagerly await Rene Denfeld's review. |
