Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #215 Born on the Fourth of July (1989)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone.
If I remember correctly, 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July was the first Oliver Stone movie I saw in the theaters. I had heard nothing but good things about Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street and Talk Radio and, being a young, impressionable child, saw Oliver Stone as a Great Artist.
It’s funny the things that stick with you sometimes. Pretty much all I remember about seeing Born on the Fourth of July was that a 27 year old Tom Cruise, playing a high school student, races through the pounding rain in order to dance with a girl to “Moon River”, something that, honestly, struck me as a bit much even when I was thirteen years old.
I nevertheless imagined that when I got older and fell in love it would take that exact form: running through a VERY cinematic storm so that I could dance with my soulmate at the prom to our song.
Things did not quite turn out that way.
The other thing that I fuzzily remember about Born on the Fourth of July is that Tom Cruise’s character, real-life All-American boy turned lost soul turned activist Ron Kovic, who co-wrote both the script (with Stone, of course) and the memoir upon which it is based, spends a LOT of time yelling about his penis or lack thereof, in addition to spending a lot of time yelling in general.
I was not wrong! Even for an Oliver Stone movie, Born on the Fourth of July is utterly shameless, rapturously in love with cliches, staggeringly obvious and oppressively loud.
Having watched Tropic Thunder multiple times and all of Stone’s movies once at most I can’t help but see Stone’s earlier oeuvre through the filter of Ben Stiller’s devastatingly accurate satire of him and his macho aesthetic.
Born on the Fourth of July is a twofer in that respect in that it’s an iconic, easily mockable collaboration between two of Stiller’s favorite subjects: Oliver Stone’s endless exercises in bleary self-mythologizing and the outsized cult of diminutive superstar Tom Cruise.
In Born on the Fourth of July, Cruise stops just short of having his skin died a darker color and staying in character until the director’s commentary, the way Robert Downey Jr’.s infamous thespian Kirk Lazarus did in Tropic Thunder, in his crazed bid for Oscar gold.
The role of a disabled, disillusioned real-life veteran whose body and spirit were broken in Vietnam before he came to realize that he could better serve his country as an anti-war activist than as a soldier is so preposterously Oscar-friendly that Cruise could have done a terrible job and still walked away with an Oscar nomination.
That’s because the lead role in Born on the Fourth of July, which was once slated for Al Pacino earlier in the decade, doesn’t just call for acting: it calls for ACTING!
Acting involves disappearing into character and using your gifts and your artistry to compellingly and convincingly portray different characters. ACTING, on the other hand, involves screaming at the top of your lungs in an endless series of histrionic, melodramatic tableaus designed to win awards and achieve cinematic immortality.
Cruise does a lot of ACTING in addition to acting here but his performance, like the film it carries, speaks loudest and most powerfully when it chooses to be quiet and restrained instead of beating audiences upside the skull with its potent and timely message that the war in Vietnam was a mistake.
But before Stone can send Cruise off to war we’re forced to endure a solid half hour of blatant nostalgia porn. The movie opens with Ron’s childhood in Massapequa, New York, which is so impossibly idyllic that it makes Norman Rockwell’s visions of American life look as grim and brutal as Requiem for a Dream by comparison.
Born on the Fourth of July depicts its hero’s childhood as a uniquely American paradise full of big-eyed children with sparklers and adorable golden retriever puppies frolicking in slow motion to golden oldies while Old Glory flies proudly in the background.
The film’s vision of Camelot is so over the top that Stone might as well have Kovic masturbate into an American flag or jerk off an American eagle as displays of patriotism.
Young, foolish Ron is of the mindset that if you don’t love God’s own USA then you should leave it. So when Kovic has an opportunity to serve his country by volunteering to fight in Vietnam he jumps at it under the delusion that the war will end quickly and decisively with an American victory.
Born on the Fourth of July’s corny, wildly over-the-top portrayal of American life in the early 1960s as a sepia-toned wonderland is designed to make the agony that its hero will suffer even more painful.
The cockiness and sense of certainty that guide Ron’s actions as a young man are replaced by confusion and frustration when he comes of age in Vietnam and as a depressed, angry and ultimately inspired veteran. War proves predictably overwhelming and crazy-making. Ron and his men accidentally massacre any number of civilians in a particularly disastrous raid.
Ron kills a fellow American soldier but when he confesses his guilt to a superior officer he fundamentally does not care. It’s a powerful scene that finds our hero’s idealism and Christian sense of morality and ethics bumping up hard against the apathy, cynicism and lazy calculation of a military establishment that would rather ignore a friendly fire incident than have to put up with a lot of paperwork and hassle.
As an actor Cruise’s defining feature might just be clarity of purpose. Cruise and the characters he plays know EXACTLY what they want out of life and pursue their goals with unrelenting, single-minded intensity.
That’s Ron Kovic in the film’s first act. He’s a Christian and a patriot seemingly untroubled by a moment of self-doubt or self-reflection. Then he’s paralyzed in action and that certainty is replaced with a powerful sense of uncertainty and a need to question everything he grew up believing.
Cruise is a tremendously physical actor. I am in awe of him today less because of his acting than his willingness to put his body to the test deep into his fifties by performing deadly and dangerous stunts.
So there’s something poignant about watching an actor who is usually so at home in his body play someone who must learn how to exist in a body full of limitations.
Born on the Fourth of July is at its best when chronicling the eerie quiet of its hero’s melancholy existence after he returns from Vietnam and tries to make sense of his life and the world.
Cruise’s ostentatious turn as a Top Gun turned hippie icon is very overtly a performance but it’s a surprisingly assured and convincing turn when Stone isn’t pushing the movie, and Cruise’s performance, to a fever pitch.
Born on the Fourth of July is an Oscar-bait biopic but it also provides a superhero-style origin story for Kovic’s activism, since he’s only using his voice to very publicly protest the Vietnam War in the film’s final fifteen minutes.
As always, Stone can’t leave well enough alone. It’s not enough to end the film with Kovic triumphant as he prepares to address the 1976 Democratic Convention; Stone must also resort to a hoary film-closing montage chronicling the many steps its hero had to take in his journey of self-realization.
It’s ridiculously over-the-top but I also got a little choked up at the instant nostalgia.
I found a lot to like about Born on the Fourth of July this time around, primarily Cruise’s performance and the film’s exploration of how society never stops failing disabled veterans.
I grew up having Oliver Stone’s greatness shoved down my throat. I rebelled by becoming the antithesis of a fan but this project has made me realize that there’s a lot that’s good in his early filmography as well as a lot that’s egregiously awful.
People and filmmakers aren’t all good or all bad. The same is true of movies, with the exception of Loqueesha. Despite Born on the Fourth of July’s reputation as a critically acclaimed Film of Importance by a Major Filmmaker it’s actually pretty compelling as long as you have a very high tolerance for hoary cliches served up straight and shouty method nonsense, albeit executed with no small amount of artistry.
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