SOURCE: Smith, Gavin. “Body Count.” Film Comment 25, no. 4 (July-August 1989): 49-52.

[In the following mixed review of Casualties of War, Smith contends that “the film misses out on the opportunity to provoke ideologically.”]

Brian De Palma and David Rabe's Casualties of War offers the familiar guilty pleasures of the Vietnam picture: the vicarious sensations of combat exhilaration and the relinquishment of moral, social and historical coordinates—as all hell breaks loose around you. But it also advances the evolution of the Vietnam genre, which has always sought to transcend the political disillusionment and absurdist nihilism upon which it was based, by entering the forbidden territory of American war atrocity, only until now glimpsed in Platoon and Apocalypse Now.

U.S. atrocity has been integral to people's perception of Vietnam and yet suppressed, unuttered. All agree Vietnam was a mistake; only some consider it criminal. Casualties of War inadvertently stumbles into that gap.

De Palma and Rabe attempt an exorcism of My Lai but in developing a metaphor about Imperialism as Will to Power—here, U.S. troops gang-rape a Vietnamese girl—they activate and then must deeply repress unpalatable propositions about the behaviorism of warfare and historical responsibility. This is exacerbated by the very strengths and style of De Palma's signature, which shapes this superficially powerful, provocative work. In fact, the film misses out on the opportunity to provoke ideologically. Unlike other De Palma films, it never scandalizes, embarrasses or short-circuits cinema's narrative, philosophical assumptions—and so never articulates its latent implications.

Based on an incident recounted in a 1969 New Yorker article by Daniel Lang, Casualties of War concerns a five-man combat unit that kidnapped a young Vietnamese woman, took her on a short-range reconnaissance mission, raped and finally murdered her. One of the five, Sven Ericksson, who had only been in Vietnam three weeks, refused to participate, but was unable to save the girl. He also realized they'd rather kill him than risk his prosecution. Surviving both them and an injury, he pressed charges—only to find the command structure reluctant to investigate for fear of scandal.

De Palma milks this paranoid conspiracy of silence scenario with customary aplomb. He adheres to Lang's interview-based account of Ericksson's moral dilemma and the army's negligent administration of military justice—but omits mention of the subsequent reduction on appeal of the court martial's lenient sentences.

Rabe and De Palma are most effective when they focus on Ericksson's predicament as the atrocity looms, then passes by. They opt for a lurid and highly effective all-shook-up approach, and the film works best at this kind of panic-stricken, nonreflective level. As such, Casualties is about the indiscriminate release of sexuality and aggression engendered by the removal of all civilized controls in war. What separates the boys from the men is the boys' penchant for going with the prevailing impulse of the moment—which, in the war zone cannot be ignored.

It is the supremacy of these impulses that, in a memorable performance, Sean Penn as Meserve (Me Serve), the squad's sergeant, understands and works from. As the instigator of the atrocity, Meserve is set to be the rotten apple who gives everybody a bad name—except that the film resists just such a whitewashing. Penn's Meserve does what comes naturally under the circumstances. His capacity for impulsive action makes him a good soldier, destined to survive; his lack of inhibitions is psychologically engineered by the military regime. Clearly the temptation is to dismiss Meserve as a psychopath among basically sound, but easily-led, men. I suspect that's not what's intended at all.

On the contrary, Meserve is a superior, exemplary soldier. His credo of power, from his crotch to his M-16 rifle, is Government issue: “This is my weapon / This is my gun / This is for fighting / And this is for fun.”

By contrast, Ericksson (Michael J. Fox) is impotent. He can't save the girl, he can't bring her killers to justice, and he's paralyzed by the conflict of loyalties—to his values or group loyalty and the chain of command.

As none of Our Boys are older than 22, the film disquietingly displays the sexual pathology of war, going beyond Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, to push kill-conditioning to its logical conclusion: wargasm. It replaces Kubrick's climactic metaphoric rape of a girl sniper with the literal rape of a Vietnamese civilian.

Penn exudes the physical and sexual confidence the part demands. In contrast, Fox is cast for his appealing boyishness as well as his air of principled decency. Unfortunately, that's all he's got. Never as believable a grunt as Penn, he doesn't have the spaced-out disorientation of somebody who's only been In Country three weeks. (Like Kevin Costner and Craig Wasson, Fox is another of De Palma's WASP ciphers and limited actors. Ironically replaced by Fox in Back to the Future, Eric Stoltz would have been a smarter choice—he has similar qualities to Fox and real talent.)

What Casualties of War offers is the awful thrill of transgression—the spectacle of U.S. troops committing premeditated atrocity. The girl doesn't “lead them on,” as some claimed in The Accused, and Meserve is disingenuous in implying she's a VC. For a moment, you're seeing Sixties Godardian metaphor—Vietnamese women held captive by GIs were a recurrent image in his movies—assimilated into Hollywood bourgeois narrative: it's sobering. The obvious temptation to read the film as an allegory of U.S. Imperialism is best resisted however. Casualties' rape rather raises questions that transcend war. If Meserve and the other killers are “casualties” of military conditioning, their responsibility is diminished and war's ideological matrix becomes a caricature of misogynistic, racist peacetime society.

But here the film's contradictions become visible. Rabe champions the real Ericksson's point of view, which insists upon moral responsibility but which contradicts the film's social determinism. A troubled discrepancy lies at this intersection of psychosocial behaviorism and humanist moralism that prevents the film from fully articulating a coherent point of view.

The Accused's view of misogyny is that there's no excuse for it; it wants to obtain justice, but shares the same basic assumptions with Casualties. Both appeal to male culture's hatred of women even as they denounce it as beyond decency. The male viewer is simultaneously implicated in rape and murder and yet invited to identify with the morally pure bystander powerless to intervene. He is positioned on both powerful and powerless, active and passive coordinates. The demands create an overload that mere moralizing cannot resolve.

The title The Accused means to refer to men but also means to make its point: that women rape victims often end up as the defendants. The film is told from the POV of the victim's female lawyer—until the deferred flashback at the end showing “what really happened.” During Jodie Foster's rape, the POV turns queasily lurid; the camera's pitiless, unflinching eye hovers in an indeterminate psychological space, at times with Foster, at times with the college boy witness, who eventually testifies. Where The Accused's rape scene was “the brutal truth,” poised at the brink of exploitation, Casualties' rape scene is surprisingly unheightened. It doesn't confront the audience with the same volume of uncomfortable imagery. It's not about “what happened,” but about what you do if you're Ericksson. For men, both films point an accusing finger—then let them off the hook.

The boy who testifies in The Accused serves as the male safety valve. It's hard to identify with the rapists because we never get close enough to see ourselves in them. This shield is not so apparent in Casualties of War. Diaz, played by John Lequizamo, twice tells Ericksson he wants no part in the rape yet takes his turn under peer pressure. He seems like a decent type. He could be any of us. Also, Rabe and De Palma construct a dramatic emotional logic for Meserve's rape plan: the VC control everything—the “friendly” but lethal village and the local bordello, too. Meserve simply decides to get a little “control” for himself.

But, as with the rapists in The Accused, Casualties is squeamish about engineering truly authentic, unsettling recognition. Imagine a film told from Meserve's jungle-law point of view, instead of Ericksson's Judeo-Christian armchair deluxe. That is to truly challenge the audience.

In the film as is, Ericksson acknowledges the shrinking moral perspective that war's absurdity induces in men in combat: “Just because each one of us might at any second be blown away, everybody's acting like we can do anything and it don't matter what we do. But I'm thinking maybe it's all the other way around. The main thing is just the opposite, and because we might be dead in the next split second, we have to be extra careful about what we do—because maybe what we do matters more.”

Rabe's speech, a vernacular variant on Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart 30 or 40 years ago, is indicative of what kind of Vietnam film Casualties is: one that's concerned with capturing the moral high ground in order to attain absolution. We can apologize for wrongdoing and move on. Thus the Vietnamese girl who sits near Fox on a San Francisco tram car, circa 1973, in the film's opening and closing scenes, finally tells him, “You had a bad dream. … It's over, I think,” and absolves both him and America. Though coming to terms with guilt could imply recognition of wrongdoing, the war is denied its historic significance and reinterpreted as a mythic schema where basic moral and philosophical problems are whisked away. Ten years later, Vietnam films—and Brian De Palma—are doing what was once religion's work: absolution and amnesia.

Vietnam vets might say that these war atrocities were committed by a minute percentage of soldiers—but that's irrelevant. The baby-killing GI psycho is a stereotype produced and perpetuated because it permits denial of historical responsibility. It was the crazies not us. In the First Blood series, Sylvester Stallone simply rehabilitated and ideologically revised that image for Reaganite America by rewriting history and producing triumph. With Meserve, Rabe and De Palma reach back past this stereotype to the real prototype—we acknowledge our rape and our rapists—to make a concession to liberals. It is not clear if anyone else is persuaded of the underlying metaphor: the U.S. rape of Vietnam.

No one can accuse Brian De Palma of not taking risks in the past. The Untouchables, I think, proved that he'd lost his nerve. Without Penn's performance, Casualties would merely be enthralling widescreen rhetoric. Though De Palma avoids the lifeless movie references of The Untouchables (Al Capone descends the Odessa steps), he has made something proudly middlebrow. Casualties is marked by a humanism that is antiquated when compared to the creepy, ironic amoralism of his Sisters or Dressed to Kill, and stylistically restrained (bar a few moments) when compared to the delirious formal excess of his Scarface or Carrie.

In everything up to Body Double, De Palma understands the exquisite provocation that perverse character identification and playful visual construction can induce in an audience—he knows how to defamiliarize our moral matrix alright. That's just what this material calls for. Yet here he opts for something straight: he trades his hyperbolic excess and melodramatic mannerism for a more intelligible Message Picture aesthetic. Respectable, moving, “coherent”—not words one used to associate with De Palma. He's bought into Hollywood's New Sobriety—the enfant terrible grows up.

Only once does De Palma's instinct for outrage get the better of him. Raped, stabbed and left for dead, the Vietnamese girl attempts an agonized, doomed escape—and runs smack into the middle of a three-way firefight between the squad, the VC and the U.S. air cavalry. It's blatant metaphor: the real victims of the Vietnam war were the Vietnamese civilians. With his pathos-milking slow motion and sadistic, operatic inflation of the horror of the moment, De Palma's scene is ludicrous—as unbelievable as it is unbearable. De Palma's scene makes a great visual—you can die from the hammer blow that announces the film's metaphor in her outstretched arms—but in Rabe's script, true to the facts, she heads away from the squad, through undergrowth, and dies out of sight. De Palma wants us to see the rounds thudding into her body à la Scarface and so dissipates the horror in a cheap shot reminiscent of a similar sequence in The Fury.

Maybe what they say is true: De Palma just likes to choreograph women's deaths onscreen—that's all. He can't resist doing it, once again borrowing from his own increasingly withering oeuvre. It is the smuggest form of self-satisfaction.

A pity, because De Palma is more than adequate as a director of Rabe's script—his bold, graphic technique serves the story. But the problem remains that De Palma has no feeling for Vietnam—no personal vision that vets such as Rabe, Oliver Stone and Jim Carabatsos have. He lacks the right-wing fervor of John Milius, Michael Cimino and Sylvester Stallone. He can't construct the imaginative concepts that Coppola and Kubrick have. He embraces Rabe's moralizing in the absence of his own interpretation of Vietnam: have gun, will travel.