A Document Written in Blood

By RICHARD CORLISS

Oliver Stone is a muckraker disguised as a moviemaker. He concocts films--Midnight Express, Scarface and Year of the Dragon as a screenwriter, Salvador and now Platoon as writer-director--whose blood vessels burst with holy indignation. And he gets money for his Savonarola sermons because he films them for peanuts: $5 million for Salvador, $6 million for Platoon. This new one is an up-tempo dirge, an I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag, about his experiences as a young grunt in Viet Nam. Stone means the drama, the carnage, the horror, the horror to be so white-hot they will cauterize and heal the wounds of war, and singe everyone's soul in the process. Well, not quite, but Platoon is still the most impressive movie to deal with the fighting in Viet Nam. Apocalypse Now was, by comparison, all machismo and mysticism; Stone's film is a document written in blood that after almost 20 years, refuses to dry.

In 1967 Stone, a Yale dropout who had taught school in Saigon, volunteered for the infantry in Viet Nam. Suddenly the preppie was surrounded by guys he never would have met back in the "world." Urban blacks were importing tactics of street survival to the jungle; Southern farm boys were digging foxholes that might be their graves. You established camaraderie with your sergeant by taking a whiff of marijuana that he'd blow through a rifle barrel. And too soon you were inside the madness of frontline patrols, a captive of the heat, the exhaustion, the insects, the hatred of men whose whims your life hung on. Every night you were shooting at V.C. soldiers, kids your age who were so close you could smell their fear too. Every day you invaded villages, where the frustration of an unseen enemy could drive you to crimes of My Lai sadism. And at the end of a mission, the corpses piled up, Americans and V.C. united at last, locked in charnel embrace.

It was the boot camp of hell, and a sensitive man could die from it. "You don't belong in the Nam, man," a warwise soldier tells Chris (Charlie Sheen), who stands in for Stone as the narrator of Platoon. "This ain't your place at all." It is, though, and that is the rite-of-passage tragedy the film describes. For Chris is torn between the conflicting charismata of two sergeants: Elias (Willem Dafoe), a natural jungle fighter, and Barnes (Tom Berenger), a pure-blooded killer. Both men have a nice sense of their power--over themselves, their men and the enemy. Each hates the other, and one of them, Barnes, is dangerously mad. Their examples, and Chris' rage, will forge the young soldier into a state-of-the-art Stone Age murder machine. He will forever carry visions of their spectacular and meaningful deaths.

In the early stages, Platoon's I-was-there authenticity does nothing but call attention to itself. That big ugly swirl of a scar across Barnes' cheek, for example, inevitably provokes thoughts of an early-morning makeup call. Then two things happen: the actors stop attitudinizing and fall smartly into their roles, and the rivalry between Barnes and Elias begins to suppurate sensationally. Elias, a night-world Natty Bumppo, believes only in his skills and his men; he is both in Viet Nam and above it. Barnes can act as impromptu medic to save a soldier's life or, with equal vigor, kill a village woman in front of her husband. In him the grunts find everything worth admiring and hating about war. And even a man determined to kill the sergeant must wait for his approval before blasting him to perdition.

The same fiery ambiguities marked Salvador, which opened early this year and has found welcoming bunks in the rep houses and on videocassette. There the path to wisdom led not from innocence but from noncommittal hipness. James Woods, the movies' definitive Sidney Sleaze, plays a renegade war correspondent, a self-proclaimed weasel with an itchy social conscience. In El Salvador (and, climactically, back in the States), he learns firsthand of atrocity and duplicity in the name of law. Because the protagonist is knowing instead of naive, Salvador never slips into the haranguing righteousness of Platoon. If Salvador nonetheless seems a smaller film, this is because it is content to catalog the sins of power; they do not accumulate dramatically until the final twisting crisis. But it is a fine study of a wily man tiptoeing through fatal corruption. Just like Hollywood, Stone might say.

"You got to get close, Rich, to get the truth," a photographer tells the correspondent in Salvador. "You get too close, you die." Sometimes Stone gets and stays too close. Much of Platoon is strong meat, indifferently prepared. His script is over-wrought--fine, the material virtually demands excess and excrescence--but it is also overwritten, with too much narration that spells out what has already been so eloquently shown. As a director, Stone does not yet have the craft to match or mediate his passion. His film works in spurts: a scene that sputters with bombast will be followed by some wrenching fire storm of death in combat. But nowadays, when directors aim for the predictably cute or gross, these spurts are tonic. They prove that someone out there, working from the mind and gut, is willing to put both aggressively onscreen. So Platoon is different. It matters.