Movie Review: Hair (1979)

The film adaptation of the Broadway musical show, Hair the movie rides along with the music. The better songs make for the better screen moments, while the many more mundane musical numbers result in significant stretches of tedium.

The Vietnam War is raging, and idealistic Claude Bukowski (John Savage) leaves the family farm in Oklahoma and heads to New York for a couple of days of sightseeing prior to joining the army. Claude falls in with a group of hippies led by the charismatic Berger (Treat Williams) and his friends Hud (muscular), Jeannie (pregnant) and Woof (very long-haired). The hippies introduce Claude to their anti-war counter-culture and before long he is experimenting with drugs and sleeping in the park.

Claude also falls in love at first sight with rich society girl Sheila (Beverly D'Angelo). Berger arranges for his group to gate-crash a posh party at the house of Sheila's parents, an intrusion that briefly lands Berger, Claude and all their hippie friends in jail. Claude eventually enlists, leaving his New York friends on a sour note as he relocates to Nevada to undergo basic army training. But Berger wants to do good with his new friend, which triggers a cross-country road trip and another reunion between Claude, the hippies and Sheila.

Director Milos Forman and screenwriter Michael Weller took considerable liberties with the story to try and create an experience applicable to the screen. Consisting of very few spoken words, Hair strings along the musical song and dance numbers and attempts to create a passable narrative. But with no time invested to create interesting characters, the film works only in parts. There is plenty of energetic jumping around in the park, but often the prevailing sense is of a group of well-intentioned amateurs getting together for a fun day of hijinks and being caught on film.

The better parts easily coincide with the can't-miss hit songs, Aquarius, Hair, Let The Sunshine In and Manchester providing the backdrop to the more stirring movie sequences. The other impressive highlight features Berger singing I Got Life while dancing and prancing on the all-dressed table at Sheila's stuffy party, the one time that the movie properly nails the essential culture clash at the heart of the musical.

The many other songs may have worked well on stage, but here they occupy chunks of time with not much going on in terms of forward-moving energy. The film stalls early and often as yet another musical number triggers yet another celebration of peace, love, lust, sex, and drugs, a message that is well and truly delivered inside the first 20 minutes.

The actors have little to work with in terms of character development. Claude the innocent, Berger the hippie and Sheila the débutante are exactly that, one-word summaries of stereotypes with no meaningful opportunity for evolution. Savage, Williams and D'Angelo are adequate within the limits imposed on them.

Hair does conjure up an excellent ending, an unintended sacrifice defining the meaning of true friendship. In a movie with as many good hair days as bad hair days, at least the ending is stylishly spiked.

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Movie Review: The Deer Hunter (1978)

A grand Vietnam War nightmare, The Deer Hunter strides fearlessly towards bombastic audaciousness. Michael Cimino fulfills the film's promise to poke at the most tender open wound of America's psyche, and The Deer Hunter stands as a landmark cinematic achievement.

A 180 minute tragedy in three acts, the first hour introduces the small, working class steel mill town of Clairton, Pennsylvania in 1968. Friends Michael (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken) and Steven (John Savage) are about to join the military and be deployed to Vietnam, leaving behind the rest of their hunting buddies Stanley (John Cazale), John and Axel. Before leaving Clairton, Steven marries the pregnant Angela (Rutanya Alda), while Nick commits to marrying girlfriend Linda (Meryl Streep) once he return from the war. After Steven's wedding, the guys take one final hunting trip.

In Vietnam, Michael, Nick and Steven witness gruesome action before being captured by a Vietcong unit, with a deranged commander who tortures prisoners by forcing them to participate in Russian roulette as a gambling game, with Steven held in a rat-infested underwater cage.

After a harrowing helicopter rescue is only partially successful, Michael survives the war traumatized but without physical damage and returns to Clairton. His buddies are not quite so fortunate, each introduced to a unique new hell. Michael has to try to pick up the pieces of his life, including trying to find and reconnect with his friends, and he will discover that surviving the battlefield does not always mean surviving the war.

Cimino does not waste any opportunity to amplify the impact of The Deer Hunter. From the brassy 51 minutes dedicated to the wedding, to the insane intensity of the Russian roulette nightmare, to the incredible prolongation and extension of scenes that would otherwise pass unnoticed (a side-of-the-road piss on the hunting trip becomes an excuse for an endless frat boy joke), Cimino goes intentionally overboard.

Amazingly, he achieves the desired impact. The Deer Hunter is an unforgettable and haunting journey, normal men torn away from the mundane American heartland and thrown into a faraway and surreal war zone. The relaxed time that Cimino dedicates to tell their story serves to deeply humanize Michael, Nick, Steven and their community, maximizing the impact of the permanent post-war damage that all will suffer.

A cast of current and future Hollywood royalty add to the lustre of The Deer Hunter. Robert De Niro, standing at the peak of his career, holds the core of the film together, and represents the men who were never the same, but suffered an almost manageable impact from the war. Michael is a mountain man, a killer rifle shot, and the most well equipped of his friends to survive the horrors of war. His economy of words gives way to fanatical persuasive powers when survival is at stake.

Christopher Walken won the Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Nick, a man forever intoxicated by the dance with death. Representing the men who either never came back from the war or who suffered such severe mental damage that they wished they hadn't, Walken gives Nick a facade of ruggedness over a personality susceptible to unforeseen emotional sides-wipes. John Savage's openly vulnerable screen persona is perfect for the role of Steven, doomed to agony from the moment Angela fatefully spills those almost unnoticeable drops of red wine on her white wedding dress.

After her brief debut in Julia, The Deer Hunter was Meryl Streep's first meaningful role and she makes an immediate impact as Linda, resourceful on the home front, hopeful for the return of her man, and then adapting to the emotional realities of a new post-war world. Streep was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for a complex performance that mixes playfulness, strength, hope and resignation.

Cazale was already diagnosed with terminal cancer before filming started, and died several months before the film was released. His final performance as Stanley is a perfect summary of his career, a man naturally marginalized and ever so slightly unhinged for reasons that are never quite clear.

The cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond paints Clairton with almost loveable industrial grime, while the Vietnam scenes receive hellish red and yellow hues. The Stanley Myers guitar piece Cavatina, played by John Williams, provides an exceptionally haunting musical backdrop to the unravelling human lives

The Deer Hunter ends with a hopeful rendition of God Bless America, the small community of Michael's friends beginning what will be a long healing process. It's a perfectly bittersweet and poignant ending to an exalted drama.

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Movie Review: Salvador (1986)

Through the eyes of photojournalists, Oliver Stone tackles the brutal civil war that destroyed El Salvador and killed 75,000 people in the 1980s. Salvador is a small film that dares to ask the big questions, and a smart enough movie to realize that the answers are most elusive.

Richard Boyle (James Woods) makes it his job to take pictures in the world's most violent hotspots, and his experience covers Vietnam, Cambodia, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, in 1980 he is living in a squalid San Francisco apartment, unemployed and broke. His wife abandons him, so he packs his car, grabs his friend Dr. Rock (James Belushi), and drives to El Salvador, a country in the midst of an ugly war between a right-wing ruling junta and a left-wing peasant uprising.

But it's the cold war and no conflict is simple: the rebels are portrayed as heavily armed communists backed by Castro and the Soviets; the army is recast as defenders of freedom and gets the support of Reagan's United States while committing widespread atrocities, operating death squads, and ensuring that "disappearances" occur on a wide scale.

Despite the chaos, Boyle is initially more interested in womanizing, drugs and alcohol, and he soon hooks up with former lover Maria (Elipidia Carrillo) and her family. But he is also desperate to make some money, so he joins forces with fellow photojournalist John Cassady (John Savage, portraying a character loosely based on real-life photojournalist John Hoagland), and together they start capturing the horrors of the conflict: a mass open grave for victims of the death squads; a trip to a rebel camp; and the disappearance and murder of innocent civilians. Boyle also chronicles landmark events of the El Salvador war, including the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, and the rape and murder of four American women missionaries. For Boyle and Cassady, chronicling the ever more violent conflict and staying alive start to become mutually exclusive.

Civil wars in small countries are particularly nasty affairs, and rarely receive much attention. Using straightforward in-your-face filmmaking, Stone whitewashes nothing. Boyle is a sleazy leach, living off others and believing in very little. The right-wing army rulers are despicable, barbarous and heartless. The Americans pulling the strings of the army are obsessed cold-war warriors who see nothing except a global conflict with communism. The local US ambassador is clueless. The rebels are initially portrayed as peasant freedom fighters who have Boyle's sympathy; but his eyes are opened when they, too, start to cold-heartedly assassinate unarmed soldiers.

The only genuinely sympathetic character is Maria, and she stands for the country, victimized from all sides, and left terrified and abandoned even by those with genuine intentions to help.

James Woods gives a trademark performance with intensity cranked up to eleven. A man driven by pumping adrenaline and capable of talking himself into huge amounts of trouble, Woods makes sure that Boyle is a memorable, hugely flawed but ultimately caring man, perfectly suited to surviving the world's worst trouble spots.

Salvador contains no glamour, no fake emotions, no little victories, and no happy endings: a perfect metaphor for the futility and wastefulness of nasty proxy wars.

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