Stanley Kubrick (1987)

By the time Full Metal Jacket opened in mid-1987, there’d been many Vietnam War films.  A few months previously, Oliver Stone’s Platoon had won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director, repeating the success of Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter in 1979 – a year that also saw the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and the publication of The Short-Timers, a semi-autobiographical novel by former US marine Gustav Hasford, on which Full Metal Jacket is based.  Even though Vietnam was far from virgin territory, the prospect of Kubrick’s entering it was eagerly anticipated, thanks both to his reputation and to the increasing intervals between films that marked the later stages of his career.  It had been seven years since Kubrick’s previous feature, The Shining.  (It would be twelve more before the next and last, Eyes Wide Shut.)  Full Metal Jacket did well at the box office but wasn’t an overwhelming critical success on initial release.  Although ‘with time its reputation has solidified’ (Rodney Hill, The Stanley Kubrick Archives (Taschen, 2004)), I found it as disappointing on this second viewing – in BFI’s Kubrick retrospective – as when I first saw it in the early 1990s.

Gustav Hasford worked on the screenplay with Kubrick, as did Michael Herr, author of the much-admired memoir Dispatches (published in 1977) and the narration in Apocalypse Now.  The script has been described as largely faithful to Hasford’s novel but, if so, the faithfulness is incidental.  One gets the sense that Kubrick was interested in, and is concentrating on, particular bits of Harford’s novel.  Both book and film open with an account of marines in training at Parris Island, South Carolina prior to service in Vietnam.  This doesn’t occupy much of the novel;  Kubrick greatly expands it because he thinks (and proves) he can make something major of it.  In the Vietnam part of the film, he devotes himself almost exclusively to staging set pieces of mayhem – the start of the Tet Offensive, attacks during the Siege of Huế.  He does this with aplomb but without any thematic underpinning.  Kubrick uses narrative voiceover – by one of the marines, ‘Joker’ Davis (Matthew Modine) – so sparingly that it’s almost a surprise each time the voiceover returns.   It provides no more than a semblance of centre and continuity, otherwise lacking in the film.

The boot camp section, while it doesn’t exactly eclipse the gruelling warfare episodes that follow, has a distinctive rhythm and relentlessness:  it’s almost a self-contained story.  Maintaining his record of strong opening sequences, Kubrick begins with a montage of the marines-to-be having their hair razored off.  This is riveting but predicts a difficulty.  In reality, shearing soldiers’ heads may be integral to the process of moulding them into a fighting unit.  De-individualising actors in a film drama has different consequences.  While it makes sense that the Parris Island scenes are dominated by the abusive martinet Sergeant Hartman (Lee Ermey), the trainees’ drill instructor, his young charges, with only two exceptions, barely register as screen presences.  These exceptions are the wiseguy Davis and Leonard Lawrence (Vincent D’Onofrio), aka ‘Pyle’.  Both owe their nicknames to Hartman:  Davis becomes Joker after his John Wayne impression interrupts one of the instructor’s tirades.  Pyle is named for ‘Gomer Pyle’, a naïve (to put it kindly) character in The Andy Griffith Show, a television sitcom[1].  Pyle is especially inept at basic training and especially victimised by Hartman.  He improves gradually after being paired with and encouraged by the capable Joker.  Pyle develops a particular aptitude for marksmanship.

Lee Ermey had served as a US marine corps drill instructor and, though he’d played minor roles in Apocalypse Now and a few other movies, Kubrick intended to use him purely as a technical adviser on Full Metal Jacket until he decided that Ermey was the ideal choice for the role of Hartman.  (Ermey wrote plenty of his own lines and ad-libbed others.)  The instructor is racist, misogynist and homophobic yet egalitarian – as he tells the recruits, ‘Here you are all equally worthless!’  His brutal, profane wit and ramrod bearing, the jogging chants, the sharp editing – these combine to define and stylise the opening forty or so minutes of the film.  The first thing that annoys Hartman about Pyle is the young man’s face – one of those that is set in a vague, unintentional smile that its owner can’t remove, however hard he tries.  Hartman does his sustained best to wipe the smile off Pyle’s face but it’s only when the latter develops a relationship with his rifle that this happens.  The film’s tempo slows as his features settle into a dead-eyed, menacing mask.  Kubrick builds lugubriously to Pyle’s lethal revenge on Hartman and suicide.

The action then switches to South Vietnam in 1968.  The film might as well start again from this point because next to nothing carries forward from what’s gone before.  Joker witnessed in horror Pyle’s killing of Hartman and himself but the experience has no emotional residue.  Now a sergeant and a war correspondent for the American military newspaper Stars and Stripes (effectively a public relations role), Joker meets up again with Cowboy (Arliss Howard), whom he was friendly with during training, and who is now a platoon sergeant.  Since Cowboy made little impression in the Parris Island part of the story, the reunion counts for little.  In theory, the pathologically disciplined life at boot camp might contrast powerfully with the frightening chaos of Vietnam but Hartman’s rampant rule is so memorably demented that the actual effect is very different:  one kind of madness is exchanged for another.

The straitjacketed training camp dialogue is bizarrely expressive.  In the more realistic, less confined setting of Vietnam, the characters’ lines often have a more artificial ring.  A montage of Stars and Stripes mini-interviews with soldiers is mechanical and the political satire leaden when, for example, a US colonel (Bruce Boa) tells Joker:  ‘We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out’.  Joker has ‘Born to Kill’ painted on his helmet and wears a peace badge on his combat jacket.  The combination has instant ironic impact (and supplied the image on the film’s striking theatrical release poster) but it also prepares the viewer for the inevitable moral dilemma that Joker will eventually face – and which takes its time coming.  Joker and his combat photographer sidekick Rafterman (Kevyn Major Howard) accompany Cowboy’s squad during the Battle of Huế.  Joker’s dilemma is whether or not to finish off a female Vietcong sniper (Ngoc Le) after Rafterman has severely wounded her and she begs for death.

Matthew Modine plays this moment very well but it’s the only moment when Joker is an involving character.  At boot camp, he’s already sceptical about the American war effort so is clearly not going to be disillusioned in the crudely melodramatic way that Tom Cruise’s Ron Kovic would be disillusioned in Born on the Fourth of July (1989), another Oliver Stone Vietnam drama (that resulted, unbelievably, in another Best Director Oscar).   A smart alec who thinks his cynicism makes him shockproof but discovers he’s not when exposed to the reality of war is a potentially interesting protagonist but Kubrick doesn’t trouble to have Joker develop in this way.   The other marines – the cast also includes Adam Baldwin, Tim Colceri, Peter Edmund and Dorian Harewood – are competently played but to no real effect.   (Colceri, as he explains in the documentary Filmworker, was expecting to play Hartman until Kubrick changed his mind and gave the part to Lee Ermey.)  In later Kubrick, war isn’t hell (as it was in, say, the trench sequences in Paths of Glory) or crazy horror (as in Dr Strangelove).  It’s more a matter of cinematic craft (Barry Lyndon is another example).

One of the more vivid bits in Vietnam comes right at the very end of the film, when, after Joker has killed the girl sniper, the soldiers return to camp, singing the ‘Mickey Mouse March’:  the all-American satire isn’t exactly subtle but at least the chorus of voices and the formation movement rhyme with the trainees jogging on Parris Island – in other words, they link where the marines started to where they’ve ended up.  The film’s title phrase, referring to a type of bullet encased in a shell of harder metal, is spoken once, by Pyle, in the last minutes of his (and Hartman’s) life.   As he watches him load a magazine for his rifle, an incredulous but apprehensive Joker asks, ‘Are those live rounds?’   Pyle answers in the affirmative:  ‘Seven-six-two millimeter, full metal jacket’.  Although the efficacy of the dialogue declines as Full Metal Jacket goes on, there are potent verbal elements at work here.  Expletives, especially excremental ones, are the only means the soldiers have of describing their situation.  The word ‘wasted’ is used, consistently and resonantly, to indicate ‘killed’.

24 May 2019

[1] According to the Wikipedia article on The Andy Griffith Show:  ‘In the last episode of the fourth season, Gomer tells Andy he has joined the Marines, because he realized he would eventually be drafted into military service. … Gomer’s Mayberry [North Carolina] roots were evident in the spin-off series Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., where his countrified, backward nature served as the mainstay for the show’s humor, making him a comic foil to the hard-nosed drill instructor …’