Amorality play
Buffalo Soldiers, dir. Gregor Jordan.
Gregor Jordan’s new film, Buffalo Soldiers, isn’t actually that new at all. It was completed in 2001, in between making Two Hands and Ned Kelly, and sold to Miramax the day before the September 11 terrorist attacks. The reason we haven’t seen it until now is that it was seen as being too critical of the American military for a post-September 11 world (read: America), out of sync with the ‘spirit of the times’. Even now it’s copping flak from some critics in the States for its supposed anti-Americanism. It’s set on a US military base in West Germany in 1989, just as the Berlin Wall is about to fall. With no real enemy to fight, and no real purpose for being there but symbolism, the grunts fill their time stealing, fighting each other and taking drugs.
Joaquin Phoenix plays supply clerk Ray Elwood, a petty crim forced into the army as an alternative to jail, who makes the most of his position to sell off army supplies to the black market. He drives a brand new BMW, and has a nice sideline cooking Turkish morphine into smack and selling it on to the MP who controls the base heroin trade. But when Elwood decides to date the daughter of the new base sergeant just to irritate him, in between trying to sell two truckloads of weapons to an illegal arms dealer and shagging his commanding officer’s wife, his cosy life starts to unravel.
The film looks pretty, but there are narrative threads left hanging everywhere and the happy ending just seems arbitrary and gratuitous. In fact, the ‘critique’ the premise of the film implies is no more than skin deep. In reality it’s just a standard Hollywood product: hero gets in deep water, but comes out on top and gets the girl, Anna Paquin in this case. The fact that Elwood is a drug-dealing, arms-selling thief who sees the death of his colleagues as little more than an opportunity to profit isn’t supposed to get in the way of us accepting his final triumph. Not that I want the film to become a morality play—but to pass off what is mainly a cynical exercise in formula film-making as some sort of political critique seems a little hypocritical.
Allan James Thomas
Swell seas
Finding Nemo, dirs. Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich.
Next to my computer is a glass of