Heaven and Earth

Written by: Stone Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Haing Ngor

The nominal third in Stone's Vietnam trilogy, this picture isn't as resonant or moving as either of the two that preceded it. Big and technically impressive, the picture seems to lack a core, a focus of meaning to ground the narrative. While the tale of Le Lei's odyssey should be riveting, it is hard to get past the blunt emotional manipulation of the images. It is as if Stone is trying too hard to make a point; he lets his technical virtuosity get in the way of the story and the characters. (He also goes for a lot of arty camera effects that serve only to draw attention to themselves without enhancing the story at all.) He so strenuously tries to get his heart into the picture that you can practically hear him puffing, and the result is that we aren't drawn in at all. The characters all seem like surface, passive participants in a series of incidents. I don't believe Stone himself believed fully in the material; it's more as if he just felt he had to make this movie to complete some kind of closure. The actors are all OK, but nobody really grabs you. In many respects they are stereotypes.

Stone has to get beyond powerful (and in some cases, horrifying) imagery. It takes more than a series of strong sequences to make a good picture. His failure to overcome this limitation drags the picture down and makes it seem longer than its two-odd hours (compare to Schindler's List which at three-plus hours goes by in a heartbeat.) Another cause (or symptom?) of the picture's weakness is the never-ending voiceover narration. I'm sure that the two (true) memoirs on which the picture is based are very good, but the fact that Stone relies so heavily on the narration makes suspect the actual cohesiveness of the picture. Like we couldn't get the message without it being told to us? Once again, it seems that Stone doesn't trust his material (or at least he doesn't feel like putting in the effort to make it work on its own), and if he doesn't, then why should we? One thing that does come through very strongly is that Stone seems to hate America, or at least the idea of America. His California sequences are so awful, so relentlessly derisive that you feel he is sickened by the crass materialism he sees--even more than by the horrible inhumanity of the war itself.

But he doesn't play fair; he stacks the deck by making the simple Vietnamese rural life so idyllic and serene that it's hard not to envy it. Even the atrocities seem to be presented with a sort of purity of intent, as if to say, "yes it's horrible, but so honest!" And that's a kind of deceit. (Again, compare with "Schindler's List," in which the atrocities are presented with such lack of emotion that nothing comes between the audience and their pure unmitigated horror.) At the end of "Heaven and Earth," you walk away feeling that war is bad and the destruction of a people is awful and that Vietnam was a terrible mistake for the USA, but nowadays those hardly seem like revelations. (1/12/94)