Plot
The biography of Ron Kovic. Paralyzed in the Vietnam war, he becomes an anti-war and pro-human rights political activist after feeling betrayed by the country he fought for.

Release Year: 1989

Rating: 7.2/10 (42,223 voted)

Critic's Score: 75/100

Director: Oliver Stone

Stars: Tom Cruise, Raymond J. Barry, Caroline Kava

Storyline
The biography of Ron Kovic. Paralyzed in the Vietnam war, he becomes an anti-war and pro-human rights political activist after feeling betrayed by the country he fought for.

Writers: Ron Kovic, Oliver Stone

Cast:
Tom Cruise - Ron Kovic
Raymond J. Barry - Mr. Kovic
Caroline Kava - Mrs. Kovic
Josh Evans - Tommy Kovic
Jamie Talisman - Jimmy Kovic
Anne Bobby - Suzanne Kovic
Samantha Larkin - Patty Kovic
Tom Berenger - Recruiting Gunnery Sgt. Hayes
Frank Whaley - Timmy
Jerry Levine - Steve Boyer
Richard Panebianco - Joey Walsh
Rob Camilletti - Tommy Finnelli
Stephen Baldwin - Billy Vorsovich
Michael McTighe - Danny Fantozzi
Richard Haus - Recruiting Sgt. Bowers

Taglines: A story of innocence lost and courage found.

Release Date: 20 December 1989

Filming Locations: Creekside Drive, Dallas, Texas, USA

Box Office Details

Budget: $14,000,000 (estimated)

Gross: $70,001,698 (USA)

Runtime: 145 min

Trivia:
Ron Kovic and Oliver Stone wrote much of the script together at a cafe in Venice, California.

Goofs:
Anachronisms: A 1957 Chevrolet convertible (released in the fall of 1956) is used in the 1956 Fourth of July parade.

Quotes:
Ron Kovic: People say that if you don't love America, then get the hell out. Well, I love America.

Haunting and disturbing, but ultimately redemptive

Rating: 10/10

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)

I avoided this when it came out in 1989 having seen Coming Home (1978) and not wanting to revisit the theme of paraplegic sexual dysfunction and frustration. I also didn't want to reprise the bloody horror of our involvement in the war in Vietnam that I knew Oliver Stone was going to serve up. And Tom Cruise as Ron Kovic? I just didn't think it would work.

Well, my preconceptions were wrong.

First of all, for those who think that Tom Cruise is just another pretty boy (which was basically my opinion), this movie sets that mistaken notion to rest. He is nothing short of brilliant in a role that is enormously demanding--physically, mentally, artistically, and emotionally. I don't see how anybody could play that role and still be the same person. Someday in his memoirs, Tom Cruise is going to talk about being Ron Kovic as directed by Oliver Stone.

And second, Stone's treatment of the sex life of Viet Vets in wheelchairs is absolutely without sentimentality or silver lining. There are no rose petals and no soft pedaling. There was no Jane Fonda, as in Coming Home, to play an angel of love. Instead the high school girl friend understandably went her own way, and love became something you bought if you could afford it.

And third, Stone's depiction of America--and this movie really is about America, from the 1950s to the 1970s--from the pseudo-innocence of childhood war games and 4th of July parades down Main street USA to having your guts spilled in a foreign land and your brothers-in-arms being sent home in body bags--was as indelible as black ink on white parchment. He takes us from proud moms and patriotic homilies to the shameful neglect in our Veteran's hospitals to the bloody clashes between anti-war demonstrators and the police outside convention halls where reveling conventioneers wave flags and mouth phony slogans.

I have seen most of Stone's work and as far as fidelity to authentic detail and sustained concentration, this is his best. There are a thousand details that Stone got exactly right, from Dalton Trumbo's paperback novel of a paraplegic from WW I, Johnny Got His Gun, that sat on a tray near Kovic's hospital bed, to the black medic telling him that there was a more important war going on at the same time as the Vietnam war, namely the civil rights movement, to a mother throwing her son out of the house when he no longer fulfilled her trophy case vision of what her son ought to be, to Willem DaFoe's remark about what you have to do sexually when nothing in the middle moves.

Also striking were some of the scenes. In particular, the confession scene at the home of the boy Kovic accidentally shot; the Mexican brothel scene of sex/love desperation, the drunken scene at the pool hall bar and the pretty girl's face he touches, and then the drunken, hate-filled rage against his mother, and of course the savage hospital scenes--these and some others were deeply moving and likely to haunt me for many years to come.

Of course, as usual, Oliver Stone's political message weighed heavily upon his artistic purpose. Straight-laced conservatives will find his portrait of America one-sided and offensive and something they'd rather forget. But I imagine that the guys who fought in Vietnam and managed to get back somehow and see this movie, will find it redemptive. Certainly to watch Ron Kovic, just an ordinary Joe who believed in his country and the sentiments of John Wayne movies and comic book heroics, go from a depressed, enraged, drug-addled waste of a human being to an enlightened, focused, articulate, and ultimately triumphant spokesman for the anti-war movement, for veterans, and the disabled was wonderful to see. As Stone reminds us, Kovic really did become the hero that his misguided mother dreamed he would be.

No other Vietnam war movie haunts me like this one. There is something about coming back less than whole that is worse than not coming back at all that eats away at our consciousness. And yet in the end there is here displayed the triumph of the human will and a story about how a man might find redemption in the most deplorable of circumstances.

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