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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 4KB | 88 lines

                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 70

CINEMA

Close-Order Moral Drill


By RICHARD SCHICKEL

    TITLE: A FEW GOOD MEN
    DIRECTOR: Rob Reiner
    WRITER: Aaron Sorkin

    THE BOTTOM LINE: Good direction and acting turn an
old-fashioned melodrama into a wickedly entertaining movie.


    A Few Good Men opens with an elite Marine drill team,
resplendent in dress blues, executing spectacular variations on
the manual of arms. In itself an entrancing sequence, it comes
to symbolize something more as the film develops.

    For one thing, director Rob Reiner's realization of this
passage is an omen of all the crispness to come in an
extraordinarily well-made movie, which wastes no words or
images in telling a conventional but compelling story. All its
scenes have been polished till they shine like brass belt
buckles at a regimental parade. More important, metaphorically
the few good men of that drill team have attained the military
ideal -- perfect order, perfect discipline. They are, for their
brief moment, an impossible dream made manifest. And a vivid
contrast to the rest of the action.

    For life, as you may have noticed, is not a close-order
drill. Even in the Marines things get messy. At the Guantanamo
naval base in Cuba, known to servicemen as Gitmo, a private is
dead -- the result of harassment by two members of his platoon.
The victim was a screw-up who compounded his sins by stepping
outside the chain of command to report a rules infraction and
seek a transfer. A "Code Red" -- informal disciplinary action by
his barracksmates -- is suspected. But are the offenders wholly
culpable? Or did they act under orders (or tacit encouragement)
from superior officers?

    Precisely because of this embarrassing possibility, the
Navy assigns Lieut. Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise, proving again
that a really cute guy can also act really acutely) to defend
them at their court-martial. Kaffee's life is all softball,
brewskies and smart remarks -- evasions of his grownup
responsibilities, his large lawyerly talents and the long
shadow of his great-man father. To him, principles are merely
things that interfere with cozy plea bargains. He is, in fact
-- neat balance here -- an upmarket version of this case's
victim, a goof-off in need of some kind of Code Red himself.

    It is administered consciously by a ferocious associate,
unconsciously by a fearsome opponent. The former is Lieut.
Commander Joanne Galloway (a marvelously intense Demi Moore,
acting as if she's never read Vanity Fair, let alone appeared on
its cover). Instinctively sensing that a cover-up is in the
making, she keeps hectoring Kaffee toward heroism. The
antagonist is Colonel Nathan R. Jessep, Marine commander at
Gitmo, not so much played as demonized by Jack Nicholson -- a
wickedly smart psychopath, utterly self-confident and
self-righteous. Nicholson sees the humor in this dark character
but then freezes each potential laugh with a gaze that is
hostile to anything not on his own agenda.

    Kaffee's only hope of saving his clients is to break Jessep
on the stand, to make the court see that the colonel's rage for
order is the ultimate source of the Code Red. Here, of course,
we enter familiar (or Caine Mutiny) territory. And here writer
Aaron Sorkin, adapting his own play, finds another obvious
psychological balance: confronting a powerful older man, Kaffee
is also confronting his forbidding father's memory.

    Men is a little too neat structurally, its moral and human
issues a little too clear-cut: at heart it is old-fashioned
melodrama. But Sorkin's dialogue is spit-shined, and the energy
and conviction with which it is staged and played is more than a
compensation; it's trans formative. And hugely entertaining.