Casualties Of War

365 Films

Entry #150

Casualties of War (1989)

Directed by Brian DePalma

The tagline on the Platoon poster is "the first casualty of war is innocence" and it seems fitting in an odd way that Brian DePalma's Casualties of War would take that idea to its logical conclusion.  The last half of the eighty's produced a surprisingly robust number of films examining the Vietnam war.  It makes sense in Hollywood terms because Platoon was a massive box office success and collected four Oscars in the process.  Perhaps that's the only way to describe how a film as grim and fatalistic as Casualties of War ever got made in the first place.  That it was a fairly sizable box office dud should have come as no surprise to anybody.  And for all the nit pickers out there, yes, I am fully aware that it was most likely the financial strength of DePalma's prior film, The Untouchables that most likely got this film made so let's just agree to meet somewhere in the middle.  In any event, Casualties of War documents with an unbearable amount of detail, the gruesome story of the incident at hill 192 wherein an American squad kidnapped, gang raped, and murdered a twenty year old Vietnamese woman named Phan Thi Mao on November 19, 1966.  All but one in the squad participated in the brutality and that soldier eventually attempted to report the incident to the proper authorities only for it to fall on deaf ears.  Even when he succeeded and a court martial was brought against his four fellow soldiers, all of their combined punishment amounted to a little more than a collective slap on the wrist.  That is not, however, the focal point of Casualties of War and if anything the film promulgates the idea that the damage will never be undone no matter how many years of jail any one person serves.  Told as a bookended day dream flashback of the Michael J. Fox character as he attempts to sleep on a San Francisco street car, the character of Eriksson is more haunted by what he didn't do than by the crimes his squad actually committed.  Sean Penn's Sgt. Tony Meserve cuts as frightening and imposing a figure that one could think of to be capable of something like this.  What makes Penn's portrayal ultimately so heart breaking is the child like way in which he handles the characters speech and behavior gestures.  He pumps himself up to sound tough, he throws temper tantrums when things don't go his way, and we rarely see him handle himself in combat with anything resembling composure.  Watch the way his eyes dart around during the film's unforgettable bridge sequence, it's almost as if he's positioning his opposing forces the same way a child configures their action figures.  That's not to say DePalma or screenwriter David Rabe let that character off the hook, if anything his utter naivety ultimately make the character more terrifying, as if at a certain point in the film he simply switched off and turned into a homicidal maniac out of a child like sense of boredom.  For my money, however, the most gut wrenching and painful performance in the film belongs to John Leguizamo as Diaz.  Watching the veneer of his humanity simply melt away when faced with the terrifying prospect of not obeying the alpha male is utterly devastating.  What impressed me most about Casualties of War upon my most recent viewing is the way DePalma's visual signatures enhance the proceedings rather than distract from them.  One would not naturally assume that a showman like DePalma (anything but a slam) would be a proper fit for an insightful critique of the Vietnam war but in a way, those exact qualities are distinguishes Casualties of War from almost any other film about Vietnam.  As DePalma passionately argues in an interview on the DVD, he did practically anything to get out of being drafted.  He faked illnesses, allergies, even homosexuality to convince the draft board he was unfit for service.  In a way, that mindset colors the entirety of Casualties of War because while it is a dramatic re-enactment of a real life event.  DePalma's distance and his primal fears allow him to stage the film in the only and most proper way that it could be: as a cinematic nightmare.  Casualties of War burrows into your psyche in a way very few other films are capable of and its unique mixture of pop sensibilities and an unrelentingly cynical view of human nature at war guarantee it will stay there for quite some time.