In the 1980s, I was obsessed
with the Vietnam War. My gateway drug, as it was for a lot of people I suspect,
was Platoon (1986). After seeing
Oliver Stone’s film, I wanted more information. I read all sorts of books about
the subject, from fiction like Going
After Cacciato, about a soldier who goes AWOL, to memoirs like Chickenhawk, about a helicopter pilot’s
experiences during the war. Hell, I even read the TimeLife books, collected
Marvel Comics’ groundbreaking series The
‘Nam and watched television shows like Tour
of Duty and China Beach. This
fascination extended to depictions of the fallout of the war – how it changed
the people that came back, men that suffered from post-traumatic stress
disorder or from the effects of being subjected to Agent Orange while over
there.
In the ‘80s, there were two
excellent films that examined the lives of veterans after they returned home:
the criminally underrated Robert De Niro/Ed Harris drama Jacknife (1989) and Norman Jewison’s In Country (1989). Jewison never wanted to make a film about the
Vietnam War as it was a subject that he felt too strongly about – so much so
that he left the United States in the 1970s because of it. However, he was
drawn to Bobbie Ann Mason’s novel of the same name, which had been published in
1985 and went on to become a best-seller. It told the story about a teenage
girl named Samantha Hughes (Emily Lloyd) and her quest to learn more about her
father who died in the Vietnam War through her uncle Emmett (Bruce Willis), an
emotionally scarred veteran.
The film was hyped as Bruce
Willis’ first serious role where he finally dropped his wisecracking persona
and really disappeared into a character. In
Country received mixed reviews and was generally ignored by a movie-going
public that was still not ready to deal with the deep-rooted effects of the
war. They chose to ignore it rather than deal with it as the characters in this
film do.
Jewison does a good job
creating a sense of place, like in the brief scenes where we see Sam jogging to
“I’m On Fire” by Bruce Springsteen as she runs through her hometown of
Hopewell, Kentucky. One gets the feeling that it’s the kind of small-town where
not much happens and not much has changed over the years. We meet Sam as she
graduates from high school. Her daily routine consists of jogging in the
morning and then hanging out briefly with Emmett and his fellow vets at a local
diner. Talking to them piques her curiosity about the Vietnam War. She wants to
learn more but Emmett isn’t too forthcoming with details and neither are his
friends. There is this unspoken bond between them about not to bring it up.
One day, while going through
her mother’s (Joan Allen) closet of old clothes from the 1960s, Sam discovers a
box of letters her father wrote to her mother while he was in Vietnam. Reading
them gives Sam some insight into a man she never knew. In her quest to
understand what her father, Emmett and the others went through over there, she
has a one-night stand with Tom (John Terry), one of her uncle’s war buddies.
From this, she gets intimate insight into how emotionally damaged these guys
are.
The veterans dance that Sam
and Emmett attend illustrates, not just the tension that exists between the
veterans and the town, but between the vets themselves. For example, Emmett and
two other vets get into an argument about whether the war was winnable or not.
It eventually boils over into a brief fistfight and Emmett is forced to act as
peacemaker. We see the intense bond that exists between these men, a shared
painful experience that no one who wasn’t there would understand.
With his handlebar mustache
and disheveled thinning hair, Bruce Willis looks nothing like what he usually did
at the time in films like Die Hard
(1986) or T.V. shows like Moonlighting.
He does a fantastic job showing Emmett’s deep-rooted problems, from little
things like wearing a skirt around the house, to big things like the
traumatizing effect a particularly violent thunderstorm has, causing him to
experience terrible flashbacks of a firefight he survived in Vietnam. Willis
delivers a powerful monologue about what it was like for him in Vietnam and how
he survived over there, as well as how he still lives with the painful
memories. In this scene, he conveys an astonishing vulnerability and does some
of the best acting of his career. His excellent performance hinted at future
dramatic roles and showed that he had range as an actor. For perhaps the first
time, Willis wasn’t afraid to mess with his good looks in order to become a
flawed character, warts and all.
When In Country was being cast, Willis was looking for a role that would
challenge him. He had just done four-and-a-half years of playing the same
character on Moonlighting and wanted
to do something different. When Willis first agreed to do the role he was
concerned about it because he didn’t know right away how he was going to play
it. However, the subject matter struck a personal chord with him because, as he
said in an interview, “had things been a little different, or had I been a
little older, this could have been my path.” During the war, Willis was
actually drafted when he turned 18 but never saw action. Later on in the 1970s,
he tended bar in New York City and would talk to veterans about their
experiences in Vietnam. To help get into character and to prepare for the role,
he gained 30 pounds. Willis spent four months making the film in Kentucky and
said that it was the “kind of movie you travel along with and it leaves you
wrenched out.”
It’s hard to believe that
Emily Lloyd is British by birth judging from the authentic southern accent she
sports throughout In Country. To
prepare for the role, she stayed with a lawyer and his family in Paducah,
Kentucky. Sam’s inquisitive nature and unflappable optimism comes in sharp
contrast to Emmett’s jaded cynicism. At the heart of the film is the
relationship between Sam and Emmett. Lloyd and Willis play well off each other
and excellently portray two people who’ve known each other for a long time as
evident in the verbal short hand between them and how they relate to one
another. For the role of Sam, Jewison saw many American actresses between 16
and 22 but he kept coming back to Lloyd because, like her character, he found
the actress, “bursting with life, almost manic in her energy.”
In Country
was generally well-received by critics. Roger Ebert gave it three out of four
stars and wrote, "The movie is like a time bomb. You sit there,
interested, absorbed, sometimes amused, sometimes moved, but wondering in the
back of your mind what all of this is going to add up to. Then you find out.”
The Globe and Mail’s Rick Groen
praised Emily Lloyd’s performance for being “letter perfect – her accent
impeccable and her energy immense.” Like Ebert, USA Today gave the film three out of four stars and praised Willis’
"subsidiary performance as Lloyd's reclusive guardian-uncle is admirably
short on showboating.” In his review for The
Guardian, Derek Malcolm praised Lloyd for her "portrait is of a lively
waif who does not intend to be easily defeated by the comedy of life without
adding a few jokes of her own, and it is the most complete thing she has so far
done on the screen, good as she was in Wish
You Were Here.” Time magazine was
more mixed in its reaction as it felt that the script "perhaps pursues too
many banal and inconsequential matters as it portrays teen life in a small
town," but that "the film starts to gather force and direction when a
dance, organized to honor the local Viet vets, works out awkwardly."
Furthermore, its critic felt that the film was "a lovely, necessary little
stitch in our torn time.”
However, The New York Times’ Caryn James
criticized the "cheap and easy touches ... that reduce it to the
shallowness of a television movie," and found James Horner’s score,
"offensive and distracting.” Newsweek
magazine’s David Ansen wrote, "While one can respect its lofty
intentions, the movie doesn't seem to have any better sense than its
high-school heroine of just what it's looking for. At once underdramatized and
faintly stagy, it keeps promising revelations that never quite materialize.”
Finally, her review for the Washington
Post, Rita Kempley wrote, "What's meant to be a cohesive family
portrait, a suffering American microcosm, is a shambles of threads dangling and
characters adrift. Jewison leaves it to stymied viewers to figure out the gist
of it.”
Not much happens plot-wise
but that’s okay because In Country’s
narrative is driven by its characters. It is one of those slice-of-life films
about a girl trying to figure out who her father was and understand what her
uncle went through. The film is leisurely paced as it allows us to get to know
these interesting characters and the world they inhabit. The dialogue is
well-written and really sounds like the way people talk. It’s not showy but
honest and heartfelt.
In Country
helped satiate my obsession with the Vietnam War and helped bring me some
closure as I related to Sam’s own interest in the subject and quest to
understand it. By the film’s end, I felt like I understood it a bit more, much
like Sam. The film’s emotional payoff comes at its conclusion when Sam and
Emmett go to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. As they walk
past all the names engraved on this impressive monument, it’s hard not to be
affected by it and I can only imagine what it must be like in person. Jewison
described the place as “the most sacred shrine in America” and called it, “the
Wailing Wall of America.” It’s a moving scene done with very little dialogue,
just simple gestures that convey more than any fancy speech could, and this is
as good a way as ever to end the film on a poignant note. Ultimately, In Country points out that the healing
process is long overdue and as a country the United States needs to come to
terms with the Vietnam War and finally embrace the people who fought in it, not
just those that died over there but the ones that made it back and are still
living with it every day of their lives.
SOURCES
Carr, Jay. “Jewison Faces
the Conflicts of Vietnam.” Boston Globe. September 28, 1989.
Gristwood, Sarah. “Nobody’s
Raspberry Ripple.” The Guardian. January 13, 1990.
Groen, Rick. “Willis and
Jewison Circulate with the Story of In
Country’s Filming.” The Globe and Mail. September 9, 1989.
Nightingale, Benedict.
"The Americanization of Emily." The New York Times. August 20,
1989.
Trebbe, Ann. “Bruce Eyes a
Quiet Life.” USA Today. September 15, 1989.
Van Gelder, Lawrence.
"At the Movies." The New York Times. August 18, 1989.
