Heaven and Earth

1993 seemed to have been Oliver Stone’s year of the woman. After producing “The Joy Luck Club,” he wrote and directed “Heaven and Earth,” an extensive, intense soap opera based on the memoirs by Le Ly Hayslip, who grew up in the rice farms in a central Vietnamese village of Ky La during the 1950s only to witness the country torn off by war. Owen Gleiberman said in his review, “Since Stone has often been taken to task for his testosterone-pumped vision (is there one memorable female character in the entire Stone canon?), it’s hard to avoid seeing his 1993 productions as a twin act of atonement. With Heaven and Earth, he has made the weeper to end all weepers” – a film where the main character, played by at that time newcomer Hiep Thi Le, sees her family torn and her village burnt. She goes through the humiliations of rape, torture and prostitution. Finally, she meets someone she falls in love with who can save her, U.S. Marine Steve Butler, played by Tommy Lee Jones, who’s a gentle, heroic man that you can predict will turn evil sometime down the road.

The story starts off in Ky La, where Le Ly’s childhood is shown as a wonderful laborer respite. Gleiberman mentioned, “Re-created in Thailand, the village, with its wandering animals, tidy tumbledown huts, and psychedelic green grass, looks like a surreal historical amusement park: Vietnamworld. (There’s even a Jurassic Park gateway at the village’s entrance.)” However, the respite doesn’t last long as war break in a drastic way that is traumatizing.

Gleiberman said, “When it comes to showcasing Le Ly’s brutalization at the hands of South Vietnamese torturers (who use electroshock) and bullying Viet Cong, the movie is vintage Stone: raw, manipulative, powerful. But when Le Ly abandons this war-torn hellhole for Saigon, where she finds work as a housekeeper and falls in love with her rich employer (who makes her pregnant), it becomes clear that, despite Hiep Thi Le’s tremulous presence, the heroine is drawn in strictly two dimensions. She’s blurry and passive, a Victim.” Everything seems to be happening to her, which at the same time helps and weakens the film’s look at women.

By the time Tommy Lee Jones comes in as Marine Sgt. Steve Butler, we’re ready for more Stone’s look at soldiers, and we get them, as Butler marries Le Ly, moves to an American city (a 60s sketch of plastic food and plastic people – just watch Stone have fun when Le Ly goes grocery shopping), and ends up being a soldier suffering PTSD whose spirit has been destroyed by the murders he did during the war. Gleiberman noted, “Jones’ showy, wild-eyed performance certainly isn’t boring, but it can’t diffuse the cloud of cliche that hovers over this role.”

Gleiberman continued, “Few would quarrel with Stone’s essential vision of the Vietnam experience: that it was a cataclysmic tragedy causing wounds that still fester in the American — and Vietnamese — consciousness. By now, though, after Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Stone’s continued obsession with Vietnam bespeaks a demagogic single-mindedness as exhausting as it is illuminating.” In “Heaven and Earth,” he uses Le Ly’s story educationally: The movie is so drenched with respect, long-suffering woman that it never quite calms. If the film gives any message worth warning, it’s that Stone, like America as well, needs to leave the war in the past.

As you might have predicted, this movie seems to have been wearing thin on the Vietnam War. I think that it was best to leave it alone after “Born on the Fourth of July,” especially since it would be traumatizing for anyone who would have seen that movie again. The first two were so well done that I don’t think there was any need to make a third. That’s the sad fact about trilogies is that third movie is often the worst and is considered the “black sheep” of the three. I think it would be best if everyone not see this movie, but if you do, then that’s fine, seeing how this is a decent movie.

Look out next week when I wrap up this year’s “Vietnam War Movie Month.”