[In the following review, Simon derides the ending of Casualties of War.]

Brian De Palma, who makes films in which women are brutally murdered, and David Rabe, a Vietnam veteran who writes plays about that war, have teamed up as director and screenwriter for Casualties of War, about an American platoon in Vietnam that kidnaps, gang-rapes, and finally kills a pretty, teen-aged Vietnamese farm girl. The film is based on Daniel Lang's 1969 New Yorker article, later published as a book. This is the true story as told by Private “Sven Eriksson” (only the names have been changed), the one member of the five-man squad opposed to the rape, who tried to stop it but couldn't, tried to save the girl's life but failed, suffered terrible pangs of conscience but, against overwhelming pressure from above, managed at least to bring his comrades to trial. It is an ugly and important story, and although I admire De Palma for telling it—some of it very well—I deplore the way he ultimately flubs it.

The film is already stirring up controversy. Movie critics are vehemently divided, veterans' organizations have lodged angry protests in Washington, David Rabe has registered his unhappiness with what De Palma did to his script. There should be discussion of the movie and the events that prompted it, and it is good that the tale on film will get out among people who, alas, do not read. But it is disheartening that De Palma saw fit to fudge the ending—or was his arm twisted by Dawn Steel, the president of Columbia Pictures? Could that steely executive have insisted on giving the customers some release, some hope, some heavenly choirs?

I haven't read Lang's book, but gather that one-third of it deals with the court-martial of the four men. De Palma telescopes the trial scenes into a relatively brief montage and concentrates instead, after some fictionalized combat scenes, on the true events involving the girl Oanh (the one name Lang did not change). For this he has already caught some flak from Frances FitzGerald, Vietnam correspondent and feminist, for having made “a sado-porn flick coated with sentimentality and laced with every cliché of the Vietnam War.” That is not a fair assessment. The sentimentality does not come in till the end, the rape is treated forcefully but discreetly, and though the dialogue has a few clunky moments, it is superior to that of Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, etc.

Some military details are wrong, however, and there are other lapses. Thus the scenes in which the squad engages the Cong across a river, the endlessly drawn-out killing of Oanh, the absurd way the hitherto canny Sergeant Meserve exposes his men and himself to the enemy, the equally absurd way none of them gets hit even as an American gunboat coming down the river is blown to bits by VC copters—all this, though crudely effective, has unfortunate overtones of The Wild Bunch and even Duel in the Sun. Throughout the film, De Palma will follow up something believable and powerful with something contrived and crassly manipulative.

Take the opening scene, in which young Eriksson, new to Vietnam and with a wife and baby daughter back home, finds himself in the thick of jungle warfare. The confusion is well conveyed. But then he sinks up to his waist into a Vietcong tunnel that gives way. He is stuck, legs dangling underground, shells bursting all around him, palm trees turning into huge, closing-in torches. No one hears his calls for help: nothing like a battle to leave you isolated, alone. Next we see the Cong advancing through the tunnel, crouching as they run; but one fierce fellow, knife in his teeth and headed for those dangling legs, suddenly has to crawl—that way you can milk the suspense interminably. But tough young Sergeant Meserve, in the nick of time, pulls his man out and blasts the creepy-crawly to kingdom come. A calculated effect, to say the least.

Next, we're in a peaceful-seeming village, where Eriksson helps an old farmer plow with a team of buffaloes; Sven is so naive he even accepts a gift of food from the villagers. Meserve and Brownie, a jolly black soldier (the two buddies are soon to be shipped stateside), lecture him about gullibility. The peasants imperceptibly make themselves scarce; VC, disguised as farmers, start hurling grenades; Brownie, with his arm around Sven, is hit in the throat by a sniper. Meserve performs wonders for his friend, stanching the jet of blood, boosting his morale. A chopper appears and evacuates Brownie, but we know he is dying. All this is shot, edited, acted dazzlingly. Best of all is the sequence back at base camp: Meserve shaves with a straight razor, says nothing while the camera seems glued to him; we sense that quietly, inwardly, he is going nuts. Sean Penn acts this superlatively.

Meserve and the chief brutes in his squad—Corporal Clark, a classic beast, and Hatcher, a grinning idiot—are unable to get release from their pent-up emotions with the local whores; an MP stops them from leaving camp: tonight it's the VC's turn with the girls. There is something monstrously preposterous about this punctilio at the heart of chaos. Enraged, Meserve announces to the squad, ordered on a five-day mission into the highlands, that they will “requisition” a village girl for “a little portable R&R.” If anything goes wrong, she was just “a Vietcong whore” killed during questioning. The scene of the girl's night-time abduction—her and her family's terror, Eriksson's helpless consternation—is bone-chillingly effective. But then comes a false touch: the agonized mother runs after her captured, frightened daughter with a scarf for the “journey”—a scarf with which the bestial Clark promptly gags the girl who is crying out in her language.

This scarf does not belong in the steamy jungle. But De Palma needs it for a parallel effect in his epilogue, a bit of gimmickry that will prove profoundly offensive. On the march into the highlands, the wretched girl is obliged to carry the pack of one of her tormentors; it bloodies her back (Christ carrying the Cross?). Effective, too, is the capitulation of Diaz, the Hispanic squad member. He was going to help Sven defend the girl, but yields to vicious taunts impugning his masculinity and to his fear of being abandoned in combat. The gang rape itself is horrible though comparatively downplayed; the main horror is in the condition of Oanh, physical and psychological, after being ravaged for two days. Thuy Thu Le, a Vietnamese refugee who had never acted before, plays Oanh, who cannot even complain in English, heartrendingly, sublimely.

But now, again, two false notes. Eriksson, whose attempts to help have been beaten back by the others, stands on guard in a nocturnal downpour; though blameless, he is tormented with guilt. Now Meserve joins him, makes a ranting postcoital speech, misquotes the Bible, dispenses half-confessional, half-defiant madness. This is the movie's attempt to heighten mere horror into the hallucinatory, the surreal. It fails—as does Eriksson's riven silence in a long, tight close-up, the blue-green rain pouring off his face in a slow-motion halo effect. Pauline Kael comments: “De Palma has such seductive, virtuoso control of film craft that he can express convulsions in the unconscious.” Maybe De Palma can; but Michael J. Fox, as Eriksson, can't. He is an honest, small actor—and I don't mean his 5'2” frame—but what is needed here is inspired acting of the sort Penn sometimes achieves (at other times, he is forcing it). The real, rending truth is in Thuy Thu Le's incomprehensible gibbering—in a language the others don't understand, in a pain no one can comprehend. And, later, in her broken moans, and, still later, in her lacerating cough, which Meserve claims will give away their position, and which he turns into an excuse for killing her.

I need not dwell on the horror that follows, but scarcely less horrifying are the vain attempts of Eriksson, driven by his Lutheran conscience, to bring the others to justice. The ever-higher-ranking officers, all bent on quashing his efforts, are pungently and ever-more-appallingly conveyed. An attempt by Clark on Sven's life is exciting, but out of key with the rest of the movie. And the retaliation—puny Michael J. Fox flattening the neo-Neanderthal Don Harvey (a terrifyingly good performance) with one blow of a spade as his buddies watch and daren't intervene—simply strains credibility. The foreshortened court-martial, including some tricky dissolves, is all right, but we are cheated out of the final confrontation between Sven and Meserve. Instead, the strongest encounter is an earlier one, when Sven tries to help Oanh escape, but they hesitate and are lost. That should be, and is, climactic; but not to match it here with another climax is a miscalculation.

And now for the frame story. In a prologue, Sven sees a beautiful Vietnamese girl riding in his subway car in San Francisco; he falls into a grief-stricken reverie. Is, then, the main story merely a dream? Well might you ask. As the main story ends, and the culprits are given stiffer sentences than they got in real life (a signal piece of dishonesty), we are back on that S.F. train. The girl gets off at a stop and heads for a lovely grassy knoll. But she left her scarf (!) behind; Sven runs after her with it. She had noticed him staring at her—does she remind him of someone? Yes. (She, too, is played by Thuy Thu Le.) Out of left field, as the music swells, she offers absolution: “You had a bad dream. It's over, I think.” The music swells some more.

Where are Eriksson's wife and child we have been hearing about? Why does Eriksson/Fox look the same age as he did in Vietnam: twelve? Why are we in this very lovely and very public setting? (The real Eriksson, still afraid for his and his family's safety, hides somewhere in the Midwest.) Here all is well: the guilty are put away for decades, Eriksson is absolved by an avatar of Oanh, our hero and America are off the hook. If this unparalleled piece of cowardice—a J'accuse turned into a J'accepte—was the price of getting the movie made, better perhaps it had not been made at all.