In "A Few Good Men," Rob Reiner's exuberant shredding of the U. S. Marine Corps, Jack Nicholson is the colonel on the witness stand who makes this hot but fatuous speech. "You don't want to admit it but you NEED me on that wall!" He's talking about the wall that separates the U.S. community in Guantanamo from the rest of the island of Cuba, but of course that wall is metphorical. It's the wall that keeps us from being attacked by all those enemies out there who are threatening us.
In a fine performance, Robert Duvall, is a Marine Corps fighter pilot who exhibits plenty of what the Greeks called "thumos", a kind of spirited contentiousness, a passionate desire to be recognized as the best at what he does. His problem is that while this works very well when he's in the air -- so we are told -- it doesn't apply easily to his home life, not even with a wife as understanding as Blythe Danner, and a couple of younger kids who find his huffing and puffing masculinity as much amusing as irritating. "Okay, SPORTS FANS, it's oh-four-hundred, muster for inspection!" He has the most trouble with his oldest son, Michael O'Keefe, who is turning eighteen and is a high school senior. That's an age at which you are supposed to be shedding some of the less-than-perfect influences of your childhood. It pits Duvall's "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" attitude against the rules of the game. For instance, when your opposite number on a rival basketball team fouls you, you're supposed to continue playing fair. You're not supposed to follow your Dad's orders and knock down the offender and break his arm in the process, causing your team to lose.
That basically is what the movie is about -- the love/hate relationship between O'Keefe and Duvall, mediated by the only truly mature person in the family, Blythe Danner. Duvall's headstrong attitude leads to some ancillary problems. One involves race. (This is South Carolina in the early 1960s.) Another is his problematic status in the Marine Corps. He gets drunk sometimes and he pulls unfunny, childish stunts on others. It's all pretty well laid out for us. The characters we see aren't stereotyped in any way, but recognizable human beings.
A major weakness is the casting of Michael O'Keefe in the important role of Duvall's son and heir. He's not much of an actor and when he weeps it's an embarrassment. And personally I wish there had been more scenes involving airplanes because I love them, although I hate them too because they done me wrong once. What I mean, for instance, is -- well, okay, Duvall has been brought to Beaufort (pronounced "Bew-fort") in South Carolina to whip a lax squadron into shape. And we hear his initial speech to the members of his new command, telling them that they will obey his orders as if they came from God almighty. This is already a cliché. We've seen it often before. But it's a GOOD cliché! That's WHY we've seen it so often before. Yet we get only about two minutes of watching Duvall chewing out his aviators from the cockpit of his F-4. More time spent watching Duvall do barrel rolls and a bit less watching O'Keefe dancing and weeping would have helped.
I said the roles weren't stereotypes, and they're not, but I also have to say that Pat Conroy's novel explored the original characters in more satisfying detail. Duvall's character has a neat, rather Southern way with words, and Conroy has a keen ear for dialog. Duvall is allowed in the film to say, "A warrior without a war -- and I count myself among that number -- has problems." And, as in the novel, members of the regular black-shoe Navy are called "squids" and "rust pickers." But pruned out of the film is Duvall's drunken expletives at a party in Spain -- Spain, not Mexico -- in which he shouts abuse at the waiter and calls him "a taco eater."
The end is a little confusing. It's as if someone had decided that the movie was five minutes too long and took a pair of garden shears to the climax. Why doesn't Duvall eject from his doomed airplane? Because it's over the town of Beaufort. But Beaufort is a very small city, perched on the Atlantic Ocean. It makes no sense. The funeral that follows is handled with far more skill.
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