70's cinema generally wears its political motivation on its sleeve. Socially aware, critical, and often offbeat, that whole crop of filmmakers typically denote politically aware filmmaking. Amidst that whole scene, Brian De Palma's films, even his best, generally carry more of a reactionary point of view. Not to say that De Palma emphatically declares hatred for the social movements or mores of the times, but in his best films (the 70's and 80's Hitchcock knockoffs like Sisters or Dressed to Kill), changes in gender or sexuality often become a tool for De Palma to exploit for heightened tensity.
Maybe De Palma's perfect handling of that material causes him to hiccup when he goes for explicitly political filmmaking. Because his sensationalist approach to direction (the long tracking shots, the brutal (often sensual) violence) carries the emphasis rather than trivial elements like plot or character, the material more often travels the most direct approach to a political objective. As a result, De Palma never concerns himself with subtlety, character development, perspective, or even realism. Instead, he goes for bombast (shock and awe). Therefore, his two war films shout with a lot of outrage and clamor but lack the verisimilitude or emotional honesty (or rawness) that carries the power of superior war films like Apocalypse Now or even something like Leone's Duck, You Sucker!
Even today, the casting of Michael J. Fox as the central character in a war film might seem odd, but for De Palma's Vietnam movie Casualties of War, he fits perfectly. I know, you're saying, "Marty McFly in Vietnam?" But simply put, in the film, the character fits Fox's wholesome career image that he had maintained up to that point. Although an occasional moment of human moral ambiguity might come into play, the character retains such a constant well-intentioned and outraged attitude at what De Palma perceives as the military's moral corruption that even his worst faults come off like a superman's weaknesses. Sure, he can be moral and condescending toward the insanity of war, but only because he's a sketch of a character rather than a person, the rock solid war hero of a Communist propaganda movie, idealistic and not afraid to stick around to get truth and justice for the audience.
This approach to character represents the film's biggest problem. The screenplay has scenes that try to keep characters balanced, but the good/bad switch holds only at on or off, and with De Palma's flashbang direction, characters are either Clark Kent or Charles Manson, with nothing in between. This handling makes Sean Penn's character a particular disappointment because the initial character work that depicts him as a fatherly soldier struggling with the pressures of the war makes for compelling material. Unfortunately, that work is wasted as time goes on and Penn becomes Snidely Whiplash, a gleeful rapist with nothing on his mind but racial hate and misguided anger. Any attempt made by David Rabe's screenplay or by De Palma to realistically depict how a human might become such a monster never settles to the character as depicted who more often just swears and mugs mean in front of the camera.
The hamminess typical of the film forces any meaningful political commentary out of the picture. At times, De Palma tries to indict the war as an immoral and brutal practice as a whole, something that never should have happened, but he does it with a simple moral story with characters too stupidly-written and one dimensional to ever carry anything but an adolescent's displaced anger. When John C. Reilly bellows about how he feels like Genghis Khan, you can't help but feel that De Palma takes you for an idiot, someone who can't realize the truth but for the movie's perennial wisdom.
Considering the flick's lesser status today (after all, it's a fairly forgettable movie in a genre that was pretty much played out by the film's 1989 release), it might seem strange that De Palma would choose to revisit this material after The Black Dahlia, a film seemingly meant as a return to his sleazy thriller roots, but he did with a pseudo remake of Casualties of War set in the Iraq War and called it Redacted.
Despite the implicit indictment of the Iraq War as a "remake" of the Vietnam War that arises from remaking the Nam flick in the current conflict, the repetition of the Casualties narrative never rectifies the problems with characterization that the aforementioned film was so plagued by. Taking into perspective the film's presentation of itself as an aesthetically "realistic" document, these problems cripple the picture as a whole.
The film begins with a disclaimer that advises the viewer that the film is indeed fictional although (and that's De Palma's key) events like these were widely reported. Where? CNN? msn.com? Wikipedia?
That complete lack of accountability immediately undercuts De Palma's ambitions and becomes especially baffling with De Palma's "in the moment" aesthetic strategies that portray the events of the film as completely homespun in some sort of purposefully faux documentary form.
This aesthetic movement works with the harrowing material much more efficiently and directly than the sweeping pans and elaborate tunnel set pieces in Casualties of War. Instead, De Palma composes the film out of "video diaries," "security camera footage," clips from a "French documentary," and perhaps most interestingly, "streaming footage" from mock websites. De Palma's ability to fake it varies widely, but the juxtaposition of different sources occasionally lends insight into the conflict.
One of the best scenes in the film has a French journalist grilling "the nice guy" soldier about the hood he's placed over a captive's head. She bickers about the prisoner being able to breathe while the innocent guy tries to explain the procedure in the uncertain moments following the raid of a house. Moments like these and the sudden bursts of violence comprise De Palma's greatest achievement in his handheld depiction of the war; the unpredictability of death from an unexpected source hangs over this entire film. In that, De Palma one-ups Casualties in getting the surrounding pressure that plagues his characters right.
Unfortunately, not all of the individual viewpoints work. The security camera footage fails at every turn, conveniently catching some important dialogue but appearing like the film's HD camera with a cheap Avid filter attempting to create some illusion of reality. De Palma has more success with his harrowing streaming video moments. However, the horror of a taped execution comes nowhere near the obnoxiousness of a facial-pierced punker woman who yells about corporate media and the My Lai massacre. Moments like this inspire laughter rather than outrage because De Palma understands this generation about as well as Antonioni got the hippie movement in Zabriskie Point.
The video diary never feels real but manages to catch certain moments, most notably the detonation of an improvised explosive device, in a light unheard of in the current run of flicks on the war. But even the best moments in these segments continually fall flat due to the cartoonish nature of nearly every character. De Palma's screenplay effectively gets the pressure these young men are under, the different media takes on the situation, and the general confusion about what's going on in the midst of the conflict (remember, this was in the "stuff happens" days of Donald Rumsfeld). None of it takes on any kind of earned meaning in the end though because De Palma doesn't care about his characters enough to develop them with competence.
As a result, we get our figurehead for the opportunistic Youtube journalist (to be fair, De Palma handles with one character what George Romero did for an entire movie in Diary of the Dead), the sensitive guys, and the jerks who initiate the war crimes. Maybe it's because De Palma spends no time in the development of his sympathetic characters that the amoral white trash figures stand out so much. They use racial slurs, like to kill Iraqi civilians, and have an armchair in their barracks with a Confederate flag draped over it. I've never known De Palma to be subtle, but at some point, it's a bit hard to take seriously.
Like Casualties, De Palma expends some effort in the analysis of his villains' psychology, but like the other film, these moments are our (and the film's) sole inquiry into what are otherwise caricatures. Likewise, moments of levity and insight regarding the wars continually takes the back seat to De Palma's angsty outrage.
De Palma probably would like the architects of this war to apologize, but he needs to say he's sorry to the poor Iraqis whose dead bodies he throws into a montage of war photos at the end of the film. The action implied by including these after such a snotty, stupid movie seems to try to get at that truthfulness that he stabs toward in these films but ends up insulting the deceased and the viewer alike. This kind of simplistic focus works great when it's placed upon visual tricks meant to titillate an audience, but when the topic turns into a political argument, Casualties of War and Redacted resemble the aforementioned angsty woman in the Youtube segment: all fury, no perspective, no meaning.
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