July 12, 1996

I know why I didn’t watch COURAGE UNDER FIRE in ’96. I was very anti-war, in a country that had generally accepted the Gulf War as a good thing, and I didn’t want to sit through more bullshit about how proud we should all be about it. And also, let’s be honest, I wasn’t exactly looking for Serious Adult Drama unless it was from filmmakers I was already into. I was not into director Ed Zwick (GLORY, LEAVING NORMAL) or writer Patrick Sheane Duncan (84C MOPIC, MR. HOLLAND’S OPUS), so it didn’t really matter that it was shot by Roger Deakins (between FARGO and KUNDUN), edited by Steven Rosenblum (STEELE JUSTICE, BRAVEHEART), with music by James Horner (BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, UNCOMMON VALOR, COMMANDO).

Watching it now, sitting through the opening news montage about the war, it doesn’t feel like we’re supposed to question any of it. Then we go into a tank battle that’s very visually connected to the way we experienced the war on CNN: night skies, burning oil wells, explosions in the distance, cuts to green, pixelated night vision, “enemies” virtually invisible, barely given faces, never voices. And they’re mostly referred to by slurs.

If that was commentary I would guess most viewers didn’t notice. It feels more like a continuation of how the war was seen at the time. However, there is something to be said for Lieutenant Colonel Nat Serling (Denzel Washington between DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS and THE PREACHER’S WIFE) having his troops pray and then immediately saying, Let’s kill ‘em all!”

And I do suspect it’s intentional that the fight is almost uncomfortably one-sided. They’re just driving along firing machine guns through rows and rows of human beings. The only tragedy, in their eyes, is when they mistakenly blow up one of their own tanks, killing their friend Boylar (Tim Ransom, OUTBREAK). The tank operator who fired, Patella (Sean Astin, ENCINO MAN), is racked with guilt, but Serling takes the blame. It was his orders.

We see Serling begin to write a letter to Boylar’s parents (Richard Venture [NAVY SEALS] and Diane Baker [also Steven’s mother in THE CABLE GUY]) about what happened, but Brigadier General Hershberg (Michael Moriarty, Q: THE WINGED SERPENT) stops him, awards him a Silver Star, moves him to a different job investigating potential medal recipients. Serling seems to feel that it’s wrong, but he takes the out.

That’s the background to what basically amounts to a detective story. He’s assigned to investigate deceased Medevac commander Captain Karen Walden (Meg Ryan, JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO) to see if she should be the first woman Medal of Honor recipient for rescuing the crew of a downed Black Hawk. There’s pressure for him to give the thumbs up, and a White House aide so cartoonishly smarmy they had to hire Bronson Pinchot (BEVERLY HILLS COP III) to play him is smacking at the lips for the PR, but some of the stories seem iffy to Serling.

The injured Rady (Tim Guinee, MEN OF WAR) swears Walden saved everybody’s lives. Specialist Ilario (Matt Damon in his followup to GLORY DAZE), now working at the pharmacy, speaks highly of her too, but Serling can sense that he’s hiding something. Hospitalized Sergeant Altameyer (Seth Gilliam, The Cosby Show season 7) can barely speak. Staff Sergeant Monfriez (Lou Diamond Phillips between UNDERTOW and THE BIG HIT) thinks Walden (and maybe any woman) is unworthy and calls her the c-word. As various people tell the story from different angles we learn about how they blew up a tank with an improvised explosive, how they had to camp out with an injured Walden, and the disagreements they had about how to survive. The story of what actually happened and the obfuscation to hide it are both pretty convoluted, and to be honest I was not anywhere near the edge of my seat. I was way at the back. Intellectually I like the idea of Serling stubbornly digging for the truth of something that doesn’t matter much beyond symbolism, but I cannot claim to have been riveted by his quest.

I perked up a little at the subplot about Washington Post reporter Gartner (Scott Glenn, EXTREME JUSTICE), whose questions Serling dodges until he decides to get drunk and tell him everything. It seems like he’s gonna expose Serling but then he just finds out he was more heroic than he thought? I don’t know. Pretty corny. I did like the drama of Serling finally telling the Boylars the truth.

Denzel Washington is of course motherfuckin Denzel Washington, so that elevates things. I believe Ryan is pretty miscast, though, or at lest presented wrong. Early on Rady’s wife (Amy Hathaway, THE CLIENT) says she didn’t like her because “She was so butch,” and this really calls attention to the fact that no, nobody would ever call that person butch. Who were they trying to fool? If they just left that line out it wouldn’t matter, but it makes it seem like Ryan was trying something she could not pull off. The gimmick is that she’s playing against type, talking gruff with a redneck accent, and that’s pretty much her only mode except crying in one part and being sweet with her daughter in a montage. She’s second billed but seems more like a “with” or “and” type special appearance. I think using a movie star like her just calls attention to there not being much to the character.

I guess I’d heard this before but the standout, at least in retrospect, is Damon, if only because it’s two years pre-GOOD WILL HUNTING and he lost 40 pounds for the role so you see his babyface and think “I never knew he was ever that scrawny!” I read that he was really hurt by not being mentioned much in reviews after all that. It was a valiant effort, though.

I am prepared to say that COURAGE UNDER FIRE is not propaganda in the way I expected at the time. The main topic is soldiers turning on each other, or accidentally killing each other, then the brass covering it up to paint a bullshit story of heroism. And even in this supposedly clean and successful war the survivors are left psychologically damaged, and there’s a very dramatic and upsetting suicide scene. The Pentagon didn’t approve of the script so the production had to get their hardware elsewhere. Give them credit for that.

And yet it troubles me that the war and its motives are presented as on the up-and-up, noble even. The Iraqi people and culture are non-existent in the movie. There’s no consideration of the morality of what Americans do to Iraqis, only what they do to each other. I do believe that there’s value to stories that are only about one specific thing and not the larger context – for example, a samurai movie could be about a particular incident between characters without requiring a commentary on that period in Japanese history. The problem is that our culture so often (and particularly in those years) asks us to remove the context of war, to “support the troops” at all times, no questions asked, because sacrifice and courage and freedom and all that. Doing their job, best of the best, how dare you question the mission, people died! On our side, not just theirs!

I will give them credit for trying, for beginning to ask questions. Baby steps, I guess, but for me friendly fire incidents weren’t a good enough place to start. Let’s at least do some reckoning with the fact that we invaded another country, then we can circle back and get granular about when the M16 ran out of ammo and who really came up with the method for blowing up the tank. We don’t want to become a country where any president can just do this whenever they want and nobody can stop them.

COURAGE UNDER FIRE was well reviewed and made over $100 million. Dramas used to do that.