| Reviewer Roundup |
| 1. |
 | Harvey Karten |
| review follows |
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| 2. |
| Steve Rhodes |
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Review by Harvey Karten
3½ stars out of 4
High school history textbooks and the teachers who overuse
them tend not only to oversimplify the past but to spoute
wholesale irrelevancies. Movies, which conjure the real emotions
of our past, can often serve as antidotes. For example, remember
how your 10th grade instructor had you memorize the basic
causes of not only World War II but of all wars ever fought?
Nationalism. Imperialism. Militarism. Alliances. Lack of a strong
international organization. Maybe. But according to director
Gregory Jordan who co-write "Buffalo Soldiers" with Eric Alex
Weiss and Nora Maccoby, the real cause of fighting is...boredom.
In this artfully constructed tale based on the book by Robert O'
Connor, boredom is the cause of warfare in Germany involving
American soldiers, but the enemies of the American soldiers
are...the American soldiers! The men in the cast plus two of the
women are so listless, given the lack of a foreign foe, that they
resort to unusual activities not so much to make money but
simply to be active. Reading a book, watching TV, even playing
touch football involving the sudden death of one of the players
simply won't do. They must tempt the fates with illicit activity to
replace the adrenalin rush that they'd inevitably feel if they were in
actual combat.
Anchored by a solid performance from Joachim Phoenix in the
role of laid-back private in one of the many army barracks in
Germany just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989,
"Buffalo Soldiers" is a dark comedy that recalls surreal offerings
like Mike Nichols' "Catch 22," an imaginative, gory pic about the
horrors of World War II. The opening scene will make film buffs
think of the stunner that concludes "Dr. Strangelove," and while
"Buffalo Soldiers" never really rises to the class of Stanley
Kubrick's take on Armageddon and while Phoenix is no Peter
Sellers, Jordan's shoot is compelling and imaginative, at once
amusing and horrifying.
Elwood (Joachim Phoenix) takes the role of a soldier in an
American base camp who fends off boredom by involvement in
black market operations with most of his buddies. His specialty
is acquiring drugs at wholesale prices ,for example by trading
enough of the base's Mop 'n' Glo to wash every floor in the
country. He cooks the powder for resale in a large lab right under
the eye of the mild-mannered but incompetent commanding
officer, Col. Wallace Berman (Ed Harris), whose philandering wife
(Elizabeth McGovern) nudges her husband to elevate his rank
while she performs other elevations on young Elwood. All's cool
until a new, incorruptible sergeant, Robert Lee (Scott Glenn)
arrives at the base to clean up operations, a weathered Vietnam
veteran who loves violence and does not take kindly to Elwood's
moves on Lee's rebellious daughter Robyn (Anna Paquin).
This base at Stuttgart (actually filmed by Oliver Stapleton at an
abandoned camp in the village of Sudentenstr. 93-95) just might
be the only place that need not meditate on a single dull moment
thanks to the black-marketeers led by Elwood, whose antics lead
to a series of violent climaxes that could have come out of Francis
Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," all the more horrifying given the lack
of an external opponent. Riotous scenes, such as the squashing
of a Volkswagen Beetle by a tank driven by stoned American
drivers alternate with gruesome revenge activities to provide an
image of American soldiers so crazy, so freaked-out, that you
sometimes don't wonder why even the Western world is so fearful
of the Yankee cowboy.
Copyright © 2003 Harvey Karten
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