MORRIS DICKSTEIN
613
movie shows them overcoming who they are, winning honor and respect
with their fighting and with their death.
Except for the last of these men, played with dignity and restraint by
Morgan Freeman, none of them takes readily to army life. In the abrasive
Trip, powerfully played by Denzel Washington, we have a rebellious figure
out of the 1960s rather than the 1860s. Trip's story is a tendentious racial
allegory of black anger giving way to integration and patriotism. This is
summarized in the final image ofTrip and Shaw together, almost embracing,
thrown together into the common grave. Having at first refused to carry the
regimental colors, Trip finally carries them to his death in the last charge.
This is a perfect specimen of liberal filmmaking, focusing bravely on race (a
nearly forgotten theme in the 1980s) yet urging us
all
to rise above it, to find
common cause.
Thus the movie reverses the pattern of
Born on the Fourth ofJuly:
there the mindless patriot learns to become a troublemaker, to focus on his
anger, to see through everything; here the troublemaker, disciplined by
training and combat, lectured by Morgan Freeman on
white
sacrifices, is
softened by belonging to a family, a community, and finally becomes a pa–
triot. For Oliver Stone, war is a sphere of urgent moral choice but its after–
math is a form of living death; Ron Kovic can ease his tortured soul only by
confession, by angry protest and grim self-abasement. For the makers of
Glory,
death in war is a form of salvation, the stuff oflegend, the kind ofleg–
end that makes things happen. It's not a great movie, but, as Pauline Kael put
it, a good movie on a great subject. Thanks to its impassioned treatment of
this unique moment in black and American history, the movie breathes life
into heroic World War Two themes that Vietnam films and books tried to
explode.
Kenneth Branagh's new film version of
Henry V
comes down halfway
between those two extremes. Based on Shakespeare's most heroic play, de–
picting one of England's most celebrated military triumphs, the story - unlike,
for example, the absurdist
King Lear
unveiled by Jan Kott and Peter Brook
- would seem an unlikely candidate for a post-Vietnam treatment. Wrong!
Branagh, a young actor who both directs and stars, goes head to head with
Olivier's famous film, a semi-official production made towards the end of
World War Two with the clear purpose of boosting England's sorely-tested
morale. The result is astonishing. After Branagh's darker treatment, Olivier's
film - which I loved so much thirty years ago - becomes almost unwatch–
able, at least on the sadly reduced scale of a videocassette.
Olivier's film was not a war movie at all but a banishment of war; it
sees the world of 1415, the year of Agincourt, as a piece of medieval
pageantry, a colorfully ritualized dream of combat and conquest.
As
Olivier
tells us in his book
On
Acting,
he took the look and decor of the film from the
gorgeous illuminated plates of the Limbourg brothers. Since England was
