The Travolta/Cage Project #60 The General's Daughter (1999)

The impossibly lurid 1999 military melodrama The General’s Daughter peaks during its first twenty minutes. The half-forgotten adaptation of Nelson DeMille’s 1992 novel opens with John Travolta lustily, entertainingly devouring scenery with a fake Southern accent as thick as gumbo as Chief warrant officer Paul Brenner. 

Our hero begins the movie living on a houseboat while investigating an illegal arms deal involving self-proclaimed “freedom fighters” identifiable by their red hats. In an uncannily prescient bit of dialogue, Paul observes, “Ain’t never been a freedom fighter worth a gob ain’t got him a kooky red hat.” 

I did not enjoy the film’s opening because it is good but rather because it is bad in a way that’s fun and enjoyable and unabashedly silly rather than problematic and queasy like the rest of the movie. 

I loved how the opening seemed to belong not just to another movie but to another medium and decade altogether. The General’s Daughter was a very expensive movie released in the final year of the 1990s but at its cheesy best/worst it feels like a pilot for a 1980s Magnum P.I spin-off where John Travolta plays a military detective who lives on a houseboat with his comically expressive dog while romancing a pretty bar-maid single mother and solving Army crimes in the atmospheric American South. 

Over the course of his career Travolta has attempted Southern accents with varying degrees of success, authenticity and persuasiveness so he clearly relishes having an excuse to trot out the thickest, hammiest, fakest drawl imaginable. 

He’s having a lot of fun that ends abruptly and dramatically once  our undercover protagonist cracks the big case and then is given the assignment of investigating the apparent sexual assault and murder of Captain Elisabeth Campbell (Leslie Stefanson). 

Campbell is the daughter of Lieutenant General Joseph Campbell (James Cromwell), a revered officer with political aspirations that may reach as far as the White House. 

We’re told that the slain woman was brilliant and bold, a West Point graduate who gravitated towards psychological operations in no small part because her own psyche was so dark and plagued with demons. 

This smart, strong, complicated woman’s entire existence is then defined entirely by sexual trauma, promiscuity and daddy issues exacerbated by her thorny relationship with her father being professional as well as personal. 

Without too much digging, Brenner and his partner Sarah Sunhill (Madeline Stowe) discover that the dead woman was notorious around the base for having kinky sex with soldiers as a means of psychological warfare against her father. 

It is of course true that people who survive terrible sexual assaults sometimes act out sexually or become hyper-sexual as a response. It’s similarly true that this this hyper-sexuality sometimes takes the form of survivors of sexual assault fetishizing elements of the trauma they endured. 

It’s also true that the United States military, even more than the rest of American society, has a terrible problem with rape culture, to the point that one of the many awful, toxic and deeply misogynistic arguments against women serving in the military was that men being men, and consequently awful and the worse, there was no way that they would be able to keep themselves from sexually assaulting female soldiers if they lived and worked together.

Alas, The General’s Daughter is ultimately less interested in exploring or investigating the very real, very troubling, very complex issues its story raises than in crudely exploiting them for the sake of the seedy, sordid mystery at its core. 

Being a product of its time, The General’s Daughter wasn’t just directed by a man. It was also produced by a man, written by two men, based on a novel by yet another man and scored, shot and edited by men as well. At no point in the production did anyone involved seem to think about what this story might look and feel like from a woman’s perspective. Why would they? Whoever heard of a female director? Or screenwriter? 

The General’s Daughter was directed by Travolta/Cage All-Star Simon West, who achieved pulp immortality for directing Con Air. West unfortunately handles this material with the sensitivity, or rather glaring lack of sensitivity, you would expect from a man whose resume contains not only Con Air but also The Expendables 2. 

This kind of loaded, tricky material calls for a sure hand and a gift for navigating landmine-filled waters. Instead West shoots for maximum voyeurism and sleaze. The General’s Daughter knows that the story at its center is achingly sad, even tragic, but it also seems to get off on its title character’s promiscuity in a way that’s deeply distasteful and problematic. 

Stowe does what she can with a fairly thankless role as pretty much the only other woman in the film. Instead of tediously making the male and female leads lovers, the screenplay does the next worst thing, which is to make them ex-lovers whose romantic past keeps intruding on the present. 

It’s the cheapest and easiest way to give important characters a history and a backstory. Cheap and easy unfortunately also describe the film’s grasp on psychology. 

The General’s Daughter affords its tawdrily tragic title character no agency. Everything that she does personally and professionally is rooted inextricably and directly in sexual trauma. The movie frustratingly does not allow her to be anything other than a powerful man’s resentful daughter and a victim, of the brutality of various men in particular and the military as a whole. 

Travolta was in a much different place in his career when The General’s Daughter came out than he is now. He was an A-list superstar at the apex of his career so even his more forgettable and regrettable vehicles had impressive production values courtesy of craftsmen at the top of their field. 

So even though The General’s Daughter is an odious motion picture in many ways, the kind that makes you feel unclean after watching or re-watching it, it’s nevertheless a gorgeous film that makes the most of its Georgia shooting locations, lending it a rich air of Southern Gothic. 

A screenplay co-written by William Goldman (that’s right, the Dreamcatcher himself) is full of dialogue that’s punchy and colorful and vivid, giving supporting players like James Woods, Cromwell, Clarence Williams III and Timothy Hutton plenty to work with.

Goldman’s screenplay might just be too much fun, as the filmmakers are clearly more interested in being entertaining and exciting than in doing justice to the dark, somber issues at the story’s center. 

The General’s Daughter arrived at a curious time in its star’s career. It’s the last film he made before Battlefield Earth dramatically ended his comeback. 

So even though I look forward to never thinking about The General’s Daughter again, let alone re-watching it, I am nevertheless nostalgic for this period of his career, when he was still rightly seen as one of our greatest, purest movie stars and not the personification of humiliating cinematic failure. 

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