Casualties of War, diected by Brian DePalma

 

1989's Casualties of War is one of dirctor of DePalma’s best films, a straightforward and powerfully told morality tale, highlighted by notable performances from Michael J.Fox and Sean Penn. De Palma has always been a master of moving the camera in virtuoso turns (or rather, someone who has mastered the virtuoso camera turns of others, such as Hitchcock, Eisenstein, et al), but he is too often a lousy storyteller who replaces plausibility with sensationalist absurdity. But with his project. Here, he gets the combination right: he tackles a crucial issue–at what point do liberators fighting for an essential good become worse than the evil they think they’re fighting? –with the right script, the right actors, and a balanced filmmaking style.

There is not a wasted scene, not a gratuitous cut or splice to hijack this movie’s power. Michael J.Fox does a credible job as a soldier with religious convictions that conflict with his mission, whose boundaries, he finds, are being improvised and diminished, and Sean Penn is stunning as hyper-macho team leader whose loyalty for the good of his men under his command changes from good soldier to concentrated evil; his sense of morality is shattered and ground to dust, and there is a gleaming insanity just behind those radiating blue eyes. What also comes into an articulate focus are De Palma’s views on violence towards women at the hands of warped men.In his previous films, women seemed little more than witless innocents or scheming, sulking whores who engineered their violent ends due to a variety of self-serving schemes; leeches, blood suckers, vampires, debilitating things to be poked, shot, prodded with blunt instruments, drills, knives. The director, a competent technician with a conspicuous desire to sit among the greats in the Auteur Pantheon, seemed to have issues with women, issues that seemed to find only extreme resolutions. The ambivalent treatment of the misogyny made you wonder whether DePalma was an inept moralist who couldn’t make his movies perform both as entertainments and moral inquiries, or if he was merely interested in the thrill of seeing women abused by disgruntled men.

With Casualties of War, the focus turns to the churning culture of men in wartime, on a band of soldiers who recreate and embrace their loyalty only to one another in the field to the tragic exclusion of all else. DePalma lines up the scenes of escalating violence and decreasing reason, until Penn’s character offers up a lone Vietnamese woman for his men to rape, offered up like a cash reward for a job well done; this is more than a melodramatic turn according to a prefigured script, but an effective, disturbingly presented result of group thinking. The issue is not nuanced considerations of good versus evil and what appropriate punishments should be meted out–it is a blunt, plain truth, the inflicting of pain by the powerful against the weak. This problematic director for once gets that across forcefully, artfully, unambiguously.