Sean Penn wants to live, too

One more film that I recorded during 31 Days of Oscar last February, never actually having seen it before, was Dead Man Walking. Eventually, I got around to watching it, writing this review, and saving it to post at some future date since I'm a couple weeks ahead on reviews and have multiple reviews saved in draft for when I have a bunch of films from a Star of the Month to write about.

Susan Sarandon plays Helen Prejean, CSJ, a Catholic nun from one of those orders that apparently believes not just going out in the community, but not requiring its nuns to wear a traditional habit to do so. She works with Sr. Colleen in an adult education center in and around the projects of Slidell, LA, doing some of the sort of social work you can expect from such a group of nuns. Somehow, a letter from one of the prisoners on death row comes to her attention; the Catholic Church, believing in redemption, has a prediposition to ministering to people like those on death row. So Sr. Helen decides she's going to take on a challenge, never having done anything like this before.

Sr. Helen goes to the peniteniary to meet the prisoner in question, Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn). (Poncelet is not in fact a real person but a composite of two of the prisoners the real Sr. Helen ministered to.) Poncelet is on death row for his part in the rape and murder of two high school sweethearts. He, for his part, insists that he should receive a commutation because, while he was at the scene, he wasn't the one who pulled the trigger, but his friend Carl. Sr. Helen agrees to support him abt the commutation hearing and appeals, despite the regular prison chaplain (Scott Wilson) warning her that death row inmates can be nasty, manipulative people who claim to want redemption but are only using this as a tacti to prey upon innocent little women like Sr. Helen.

Sr. Helen goes to the hearings, and is buttonholed after one of the hearings by... the parents of the two murder victims, Mr. Delacroix (Raymond Barry) and the Percys (R. Lee Ermey and Celia Weston). These three are, needless to say, not particularly happy with Sr. Helen's work with Poncelet. Doesn't she know that there was grieving family left behind? Couldn't she have been bothered to listen to their side of the story rather than just naïvely accepting Poncelet's story? So Sr. Helen goes to see the Percys and Delcroix to talk to them in more detail while also talking to Poncelet's mother and siblings, to get a much more complicated view of the case.

Along the way, as she keeps talking to Poncelet himself, she finds that he is in many ways the sort of thoroughly nasty person the chaplain said death row inmates can be. Poncelet can be arrogant, violent, and certainly a nasty racist even though the two murder victims happen to be white. The appeals fail, and Poncelet's execution date is set, with Sr. Helen offering to be the spiritual advisor to Poncelet. This leads up to a climax that's part I Want to Live! and part Angels with Dirty Faces.

The real life Sr. Helen Prejean is a noted advocate against capital punishment, and the movie is based on her own memoir also titled Dead Man Walking. As I've mentioned myself on several occasions, I don't trust the state to mete out capital punishment, although I come at this view from a rather different starting point than most anti-death penalty people. (I'd argue, for example, that a lot of the people who claimed to oppose police brutality when it visited George Floyd suddenly became a lot more accepting of police brutality, and deliberately harsh sentencing, on January 6, 2021.) But where I hated the climax of I Want to Live! because it was horrendously propagandistic, Dead Man Walking is much more nuanced: yes, the people involved in making the movie oppose the death penaly, but they also show us that a lot of the Matthew Poncelets of the world are in fact nasty people who destroy the lives of a whole lot of people they leave behind.

Dead Man Walking is also helped by outstanding performances from the two leads. So if you haven't seen it before, do yourself a favor and watch Dead Man Walking.

Technically, there is a dance

Quite some time back now TCM ran a spotlight on actors before they became stars. One of the films they selected was the sort of 1980s film that I remember coming out in theaters but never got the chance to see back in the day because I was much too young for it. That movie is Taps, which helped launch the careers of Tom Cruise and Sean Penn.

Bunker Hill Military Academy is one of those venerable old private schools that uses military theory and education to mold young boys into men and prepare them to become the next class of officers in the American military. Harlan Bache (George C. Scott) is the school's commander general, leading a non-denominational military service to close out the academic year and name the end-of-the-alphabet alumni who gave their lives on the field of battle in wars of the past.

That evening, Bache meets with Brian Moreland (Timothy Hutton, who at the time was the star among the young cast members) to inform Moreland that he's going to be the school's Cadet Major the following year, which is basically the highest-ranking position any of the students can hold. Moreland returns to his dorm to his two best friends and seconds-in-command, Cadet Captain Dwyer (Sean Penn) and Cadet Captain Shawn (Tom Cruise), as well as to get ready to help run the school's summer programs and prepare formation for commencement the following day.

At commencement, Bache has a shocking announcement: the trustees of Bunker Hill have decided to sell the land and buildings that comprise the school to developers. But because everybody who's enrolled for the following year isn't going to be able to get a place in a different school at this late date, the trustees have generously allowed the school to remain open one more year, which will also allow seniors like Moreland, Dwyer, and Shawn to graduate. All of the students as well as Bache are none too pleased with this, but any protestations they make are going to fall on deaf ears.

Later that evening is the commencement dance, with Bache in the cadets all in full dress uniform. News of the school's impending closure has reached locals who apparently don't think about whether having this school here has economic benefits simply having more residential space might not. I'm guessing there have been other long-standing animosities between town and gown as it would be called with a traditional college, as some of the local boys of the same age as the cadets show up to taunt the cadets as everybody is coming to the dance. A scuffle ensues, and as Bache is trying to break things up, somebody goes for his gun, which is loaded and which goes off, seriously injuring one of the locals. In reaction to this and all the stress he's been under, Bache suffers a heart attack and is taken to hospital.

Cadet Major Moreland more or less sees himself as the highest ranking person around campus now, since there doesn't seem to have been any succession plan in place for Bache -- not that there needed to be since the school was going to be shut down after one more year. But Moreland comes up with the daring plan of occupying the school in order to get the trustees to listen to the cadets' message and possibly change their decision to sell off the school. Likely the contracts have already been signed so it's a fait accompli, but the cadets understandably would have overlooked that.

What happens is a standoff. The authorities could easily shut off water and electric and drive the students out in a day or two, but they'd like to do things more peacefully, because even Moreland is a kid who may at most only recently have reached the age of majority. Some of the younger cadets think of it at first as a jolly old game of war like the kids in No Greater Glory, while others only refuse to give up because they feel they're acting on orders and it would be desertion to give up. Moreland tries to act like a seasoned leader and use mature military tactics to keep the occupation going, but as time goes on a lot of kids do want to give up. Others, like Cadet Shawn, grow more radical.

I've read reviews from people who actually attended military schools that there's a lot about Taps that's fairly unrealistic. That's a fair criticism. However, I think that at heart Taps isn't really a military movie, but one that uses a military school to set up a character study. After all, there's a fair bit less action than you would expect from a real war movie. As a character study, and exploring themes like honor and duty, Taps works fairly well, thanks to good performances from the young stars. George C. Scott doesn't have quite as much to do, since he's out of the movie a third of the way in.

Taps isn't perfect by any means, but it's still a decidedly watchable movie.

Casualties of War

Another of the movies that I had the chance to record thanks to one of the DirecTV free preview weekends was Casualties of War. It's going to be on again, overnight tonight at 2:30 AM (which might be very early tomorrow depending upon your perspective) on Epix, so recently I watched it to do a review on it here.

Michael J. Fox, best known for his sitcoms but doing drama here, plays Max Eriksson, taking a commuter train in August 1974 in the movie's opening (we know this because of the headlines stating that Richard Nixon is going to announce his resignation on TV that evening). Eriksson sees a Vietnamese-American woman who looks extremely familiar, and starts to have a flashback....

Eriksson was drafted to serve in the Vietnam War, an experience that proved traumatic for many of the people who served, if they even made it out alive. Eriksson's platoon is out on patrol when the ground above a Viet Cong tunnel gives way above him, forcing his commander, Sgt. Meserve (Sean Penn) to save his life. Eventually, the platoon members who are uninjured, Eriksson and Meserve, along with Pvt. Hatcher (John C. Reilly) and Cpl. Clark (Don Harvey), make it back to base, where Pvt. Diaz (John Leguizamo) is assigned to their outfit to replace a man who was injured and ultimately died.

The platoon wants to go out for a night on the town during their two days' leave, but the town is now off-limits. So Meserve announces to the platoon that on their next mission, they're going to "requisition" a Vietnamese girl, something that obviously troubles Eriksson, although everybody else takes it as a joke. And to be fair, in war zones and other dark times, it's easy to develop an extremely dark and cynical sense of humor. Heaven knows there are places I frequent where that's become the norm during the coronavirus panic.

It turns out, however, that Meserve isn't joking. On the next patrol, they stop in a village where they find a young woman named Oahn (Thuy Thu Le, who of course was also playing the young woman on the train in the opening scene). Meserve kidnaps her and takes her with the rest of the platoon to wherever it is they're supposed to set up shop, where the plan is that all of the men are going to rape her.

Eriksson is definitely not up for it, and protests, while Diaz isn't so sure that he wants to be involved in such a war crime, either. Thankfully, he's got Eriksson to back him up. But Meserve and the other two men in the platoon are going to gang rape her, and they're in the majority. And a sergent like Meserve is able to put a significant amount of pressure on a young private like Diaz fresh out in the field, leading Diaz to crack and join the other three soldiers. Eriksson thinks of going AWOL to return the young woman to her home, but there's the problem of desertion, and then the Viet Cong attack.

After the whole operation, Eriksson tells one of his friends not in the platoon about what happened, who suggests going to their commander above the sergeant, Lt. Reilly (Ving Rhames). Reilly makes it clear that going public with it isn't going to do much since the other four will all be freed pretty darn quickly, which is a sad fact of life but a fact it is. At least he can split the platoon up. This doesn't stop Eriksson, at least not until a Captain, even further up the chain of command, also shoots down Eriksson's idea of going public. Thankfully a chaplain has a different view of things, leading to a court-martial.

Casualties of War is based on a real incident, although the names of most of the people involved were changed. Fox does surprisingly well for a drama, while Penn and Don Harvey are also quite good as the two main bad guys. Leguizamo gets an auspicious start to his career. One problem I did have with the movie, however, is that there's a short coda after the flashback, and that came across to me as rather unrealistic dialog.

That one flaw aside, however, Casualties of War is definitely a film that is worth watching.