Heaven and Earth

Oliver Stone – 1993 – USA

The conventional wisdom was that Oliver Stone went to the Vietnam well one too many times with this film, and I don’t much disagree.  I understand the urge to complete what he saw as a trilogy, but the difference this time was that he wanted to present the Vietnamese point-of-view as opposed to the American side.  The problem is, Stone doesn’t know more than anyone else about the Vietnamese side of things, whereas his personal experiences were so crucial to his previous features Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), which of course are far superior films to Heaven and Earth.  In making a sweeping epic about one woman’s courage, Stone is a little too transparent in his hunger for Oscars and he treads into Spielberg territory without the juice to fully sustain his trip.  (How it must have irked him when he realized that Spielberg himself was all finished with laying back that year and, not ready to be usurped, was busy out-Spielberging himself with the amazing double release of Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List.)  Hiep Thi Le does an admirable job carrying the film in a role that spans decades and is also refreshingly not noble to a fault but has moments of selfishness, cowardice and vanity too.  She does seem weak, though, when surrounded by imposing actors like Haing S. Ngor as her father and especially Tommy Lee Jones as her American husband suffering from PTSD.  There are many striking, beautiful images in the film, and wrenching scenes of war violence, and Stone potently drives home the plight of non-political peoples caught in the absurd tug-of-war between competing ideologies and their armed partisans.  Ultimately, though, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Stone has run out of stuff to say about Vietnam, and that, if he had to make a third film on the subject, would possibly have been better off continuing to study the American experience, as with the Jones character, who unfortunately comes and goes far too quickly.