They don’t make them like that anymore

For the first time ever, I watched “Born on the Fourth of July”, the 1989 feature by Oliver Stone. Tom Cruise is playing Vietnam veteran Ronnie Kovic, who got paralyzed after taking a wound in battle and was traumatized before by killing civilians and a friendly-fire-incident. If you’re interested in my assessment on the quality of the movie – it’s pretty good and still watchable, mostly thanks to Cruise, who proves his dramatic qualities here (it’s so weird he turned to action movies late in his career after starting out as a drama actor). So if you’re interested in the subject matter and can cope with the somewhat unusual structure (getting there), then by all means, give this classic a go.

But why did I claim that “they don’t make them like that anymore” in the title? The movie is an unabashed anti-war movie, alright, but it’s not like those wouldn’t be made anymore. In an ironic twist, the Robert-Redford-vehicle “Of Lambs and Lions” also features Tom Cruise, this time as a smarmy politician sending the young people into a useless war for political gain that he played in “Born on the Fourth of July”.

No, the unusual thing are the politics of this movie. Oliver Stone made a pretty lefty movie here, but once again, it’s not like having left protest issues in movies would be something consigned to the 1980s; we still have a lot of these movies today. However, what we definitely don’t have anymore are big budget movies that have a juxtaposition of storming the police line at the Republican Convention and a big speech on the Democratic Convention as the climax of the movie.

I mean, seriously, the two emotional high points of this flick are the protesters at the Republican Convention 1972 ATTACKING THE POLICE TO A ROUSING SCORE and then Kovic getting the opportunity to speak on the floor of the Democratic Convention. This obvious side-taking in terms of the political parties just doesn’t happen anymore. Usually, “politicians” are nondescript in their party affiliation, basically inhabiting the moderate No Man’s Land of West-Wing times. Here, we have a guy who in the credits is literally billed as “Fat Republican” shouting obscenities at our hero.

Before you go into a “holy cow back then politics in movies were great!”, we have made a change in style, not intensity, I feel. While Stone was much more partisan and adopting the topics of politics of the day, he spares little thoughts on questions like race and gender, which are the main focus today. The main characters are white, their experiences are white, their lifestyles and locations are white. Black characters only intersect where their lives overlap with whites (tellingly, at the absolute low-point in a rundown hospital), and they’re serving as antagonists to our hero, where the only decent person is the white doctor. Also something they wouldn’t make like that today, I’m sure.

The gender politics are similar. War movies always have the problem of writing in meaningful female characters, but here, we have three of them: Kovic’s mother, who is zealously religious and disowns him when he’s at his lowest; his old love interest, who abandons him to fulfill her own desires; and a hooker in Mexico who’s, well, a hooker.

However, the movie manages to avoid being aggressively ignorant here because of its focus on Kovic’s life as a biopic, and a biopic of the good kind. And there are practically no good biopics, they’re all shit. What “Born on the Fourth of July” does is to give the feel of us really seeing a part of Kovic’s life.

The main instrument in achieving this is the successful resistance of Stone in giving him too clear a character arc. Sure, we have a progression towards the conclusion, where he becomes a spokesperson for disabled veterans, but everything else is incredibly episodic, with people dropping in and out of the narrative. The fate of his former love interest is especially telling. When he comes to visit, she is mostly interested in campus politics and tries to use him as an asset, and when Kovic realizes that, he leaves – never to see her again. The same happens to the veteran he meets in Mexico, who offers another (toxic and self-destructive) way of coping, with whom he has a falling out and likewise never sees again. I like this, because it mirrors accurately how real life works. We meet people, we lose contact with people, we meet new people, but our lode star remains mostly the social circle we had in the beginning.