Born on the Fourth of July

As a teenager in Massapequa, LI, in the 1960s, Ron Kovic believed in every right thing, including God, county and the domino theory. Vincent Canby described Ron Kovic like this: “He was Jack Armstrong, the all-American boy, good-looking, shy around girls and a surreptitious reader of Playboy. He was the archetypal son in a large archetypal lower-middle-class Roman Catholic family.”

When he fought as a part of the high school wrestling team, he wanted to win, and when he lost a match, he cried. Winning was his way of measuring how much he believed in himself. He didn’t question the values creating his positivity.

When he graduated from high school, he signed up for the Marine Corps to fight in Vietnam. “Communists are moving in everywhere,” he told his kind of more doubtful classmates. Canby said, “Home and hearth were endangered.” Ron Kovic, who actually was born on July 4^th, was ready when his country needed him.

In 1968, in his second on-duty call in Vietnam, a bullet shot him in his spinal column. Canby said, “He returned home a paraplegic, paralyzed from the waist down, emotionally as well as physically shattered. That was the beginning of a long, painful spiritual rehabilitation that coincided with his political radicalization.”

When the war had ended, Ron Kovic became one of the most impatient and cruel spokesmen for Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Childhood was now extinguished.

Taking Born on the Fourth of July, Ron Kovic’s famous spare memoir about his life story, published in 1976, Oliver Stone has made what is, in result, a 1989 harsh, furious afterthought to his Oscar-winning “Platoon.”

It is a film of huge animal power with, in the main role, a performance by Tom Cruise that gives everything that is best about the movie. He is both particular and characteristic. Canby said, “He is innocent and clean-cut at the start; at the end, angry and exhausted, sporting a proud mustache and a headband around his forehead and hippie-length hair.”

Though people say he’s handsome, Cruise looks completely right, which is not to underrate the performance itself. The two things cannot be easily separated. Watching Ron Kovic change, as he comes to grips with a reality that he was completely unprepared for, is both disturbing and inspiring.

Written by Oliver Stone and Ron Kovic, the screenplay is patriotic, sometimes too panoramic for its own good. It tells Ron’s childhood, his teenage years, his enlistment, the on-duty in Vietnam and his long recovery in a Bronx veterans’ hospital, a place that, as said by Canby, “makes Bedlam look like summer camp.”

Canby said, “No other Vietnam movie has so mercilessly evoked the casual, careless horrors of the paraplegic's therapy, or what it means to depend on catheters for urination, or the knowledge that sexual identity is henceforth virtually theoretical.”

Canby continued, “One of the film's problems is that it becomes increasingly generalized as it attempts to dramatize Mr. Kovic's transformation from a wide-eyed Yankee Doodle boy to an antiwar activist.”

The film is amazing when it is really specific. There is the nighttime mission when Ron’s outfit kills a group of Vietnamese peasants in the thought that a Vietcong patrol has been trapped.

In the confusion of a gun fight, Ron shoots one of his own corporals, played by Michael Compotaro, through the neck. When he tries to admit what he did, he is given pardon by an officer, played by Tom Berenger, who tells him that he must be mistaken and that, really, these things happen.

Equally painful are the post-hospital scenes when Ron returns to his well-meaning but confused family in Massapequa (Raymond J. Barry, Caroline Kava, Josh Evans, Jamie Talisman, Anne Bobby and Samantha Larkin), where he is awarded as the grand marshal of the annual Fourth of July parade. People are always trying to help, but he always replies with, “I’m O.K. I’m all right,” or “O.K. O.K.” However, there is no understanding.

There is a really sad scene with the family when Ron comes home one night from the local bar, drunk as that’s what he has picked up. In a PTSD moment, he pulls out the catheter. His mother calls him a drunk. His father tries to put him inside his room. Ron cries about his dead manhood. His mother screams to not use that specific word in her house (you know what word I’m talking about, don’t act like you don’t).

The film becomes less persuasive when Ron gets his new political awareness, maybe because, seeing everything that he has gone through before, the change is so necessary to the drama. Canby said, “Mr. Stone's penchant for busy, jittery camera movements and cutting also do not help.” Despite they reflect at Ron’s earlier version, they start to doubt the character of the man they are going to show.

Every cast member in here is excellent. It includes Raymond J. Barry and Caroline Kava as Ron’s parents, the great Kyra Sedgwick (Kevin Bacon's wife) as his high school girlfriend, Frank Whaley, who is really good as a fellow veteran, one of the few people that Ron can talk to when he comes home, and Cordelia Gonzalez as the Mexican prostitute who tries to persuade Ron that he’s still a man.

The two stars of “Platoon” make cameo appearances: Tom Berenger, as the marine who recruits Ron with his inspiring speech at Ron’s high school, and Willem Dafoe, as a fellow handicap veteran Ron meets during a brief visit in Mexico. An aging Abbie Hoffman, an icon of the Vietnam War, makes a sad, curious cameo, more or less playing himself during an antiwar demonstration set in the 1960s. (Hoffman killed himself in April at the age of 52.) “Born on the Fourth of July” is a far more difficult movie to watch than “Platoon.” Canby said, “It's the most ambitious nondocumentary film yet made about the entire Vietnam experience. More effectively than Hal Ashby's ''Coming Home'' and even Michael Cimino's ''Deer Hunter,'' it connects the war of arms abroad with the war of conscience at home.”

As much as anything else, Ron Kovic’s story is about the killing of one man’s American boundary.

As I have stated before, this is a really sad and difficult movie to watch, emotionally speaking. If you get the chance to see it, you only need to see it once, and the effect stays with you forever. If you can actually watch this more than once, then you have more willpower than I do. I do say watch this, as it is a film that should not be missed, just so that you know something about Ron Kovic’s life. You don’t want to miss the chance to watch this movie.

With that said, check in next week where we look at the finale of Oliver Stone’s Vietnam Trilogy in “Vietnam War Movie Month.”