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Buffalo Soldiers
***
Capsule-length
Cinema Review - Week of August 8, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. USA.
98 minutes. Directed by Gregor Jordan. Produced by Rainer Grupe, Ariane Moody.
Written by Gregor Jordan, Nora Maccoby, Eric Axel Weiss; based on the book
by Robert O'Connor. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Ed Harris, Scott Glenn, Anna
Paquin, Elizabeth McGovern, Michael Pena, Leon Robinson, Gabriel Mann, Dean
Stockwell.
An odd one, this one. Joaquin Phoenix plays Elwood,
one of those guys who got shovelled off to serve in the US Army instead of
spending six months in jail. His company is based in Germany in 1989, but
Phoenix and his buddies don't even know where the Berlin Wall is. He's more
interested in milking the situation, getting comrades to buy his heroin or
help out in scams, and noticing how his colonel (Ed Harris) is a hesitantly
ambitious klutz, ready to be played for a fool.
There's a high-energy look, powering a tone of
sorta satirical deadpan comedy: High-ranking personnel are gotten around,
suckers are screwed over, tanks are blown up, and Phoenix reacts to it all
with dead-eyed stares into nowhere and nihilistic shrugs. The comedic rhythm
is all a bit "MASH", and although I still can't bring myself to like that
movie, because I just can't latch onto its tone, the funny stuff here works
better -- it's more focused on looking at the humour of evil pranks and absurd
situations than fuzzy jabs at bigger issues.
Problems arise when the director, Gregor Jordan,
tries to combine his hip cynicism with a fully rounded story. A running argument
with a sergeant (Scott Glenn) turns into something dramatic, it's mixed up
with a romance involving his daughter (Anna Paquin), and during the action
climax a whole lot of cutaways to shots of the Berlin Wall falling down seem
tacked in there just to snatch at significance. The movie is fun enough to
be worth seeing, but it would get more respect if it figured out a way to
run for feature length without stopping to play dumb for romances, double-crosses
and out-of-place character development.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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