| Overall Grade: |
B+ |
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| Story: |
B- |
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| Acting: |
A- |
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| Direction: |
B+ |
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| Visuals: |
B |
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Compelling premise, acting; but flawed resolution.
by Sunshine (movies profile)
Nov 23, 2007
4
of
6 people found this review helpful
Buffalo Soldiers purports to dark comedy, following the questionable exploits of young US Army company clerk Ray Elwood (Joaquin Phoenix) in West Germany, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Careening from one barely-plausible episode to the next, it attempts to exhume the indiscretions of an Army at leisure in the waning days of the Cold War, opining late in the film that "a soldier not at war with the enemy makes war upon himself." This is perhaps the most cogent statement of the movie's leitmotif--though it seems to strain to keep that theme in mind.
Elwood is an entrepreneurial sort inducted into the army as an alternative to jailtime; as narrator, he implies that many of his fellow servicement have the same provenance. Under the command of the charmingly feckless Colonel Berman (Ed Harris), Elwood and his cronies have essentially free reign for their mischiefs. At first the movie's laughs are light and episodic, as the audience witnesses Elwood's embezzlements of cleaning supplies for resale to local retailers, palatial quarters, and his silver-tongued toadying to the oblivious Berman. In his spare time, of which he seems to have plenty, he drives a Mercedes, revelling in the autobahn.
But even from the outset, there are shades of the darkness which is to pervade and overwhelm the comedic elements. The film opens with the accidental death of a soldier during a game of pickup football; he is callously thrown from a window to obscure the cause of death. Ellwood and Berman's collaboration on the letter to the young man's parents is perhaps one of the best examples of dark comedy in the film, as most of it tends towards overweighty cynicism. We soon learn that Elwood is cooking heroin in the base's cellars as supplier to the local chief of military police, who is, of course above the law. And an initially light lark as a cracked-out tank crew careen off-course turns serious as the misfits explode a gas station, incinerating two army couriers who happen to be driving their convoy nearby. Elwood's mercenary stance to the brutal deaths--focusing on stealing the trucks--borders on the macabre.
It turns out that the stolen trucks contain high-powered weapons, launching Elwood and his crew into the first of two parallel and increasingly weighty stories. At one point later in the film, trying to back out of a situation out-of-control, Elwood is slapped by the arms dealer, who upbraids him, "Did you think you were playing games?" Manifestly, Elwood does, but the audience can see that this isn't going to turn out well.
In the other plot--the two seem wholly unrelated in the narrative, and the film shifts back and forth in large chunks--the company received a new top sergeant (Scott Glenn), who hates Elwood at first sight. Grokking Elwood's game from the start, the Top sets out to make life for him miserable, cracking down on the profligate requisitions, stripping Elwood of his highly non-regulation living quarters, and honing in on the drug operations. The conflict between Elwood and the Top waxes apocalyptic as Elwood moves in on the sergeant's young daughter, Robyn Lee (Anna Paquin), going out of his way to incense the top. But just as Elwood failed to apprehend how gravely serious the arms trade is, so too he underestimates the Top as the film twists into wilder. Perhaps too invested in the idea of an army at leisure turning to infighting, the plot descends into a near-constant state of escalating conflict, as the body count rises.
Ultimately, the audience becomes as skeptical of the plot as Elwood himself, wondering how such an avalanche of woes could all happen at once. The tidy resolution--deux ex machina and all--is profoundly unsatisfying, redeemed only by a clever epilogue which reveals in a matter of a minute more of Elwood's character than the entire latter half of the film.
Though it suffers from a plot seemingly abandoned in the third act, the acting is excellent throughout, with one glaring exception. Joaquin Phoenix as Elwood delivers an understated role as a cheeky bastard who's become accustomed to getting everything he wants, only to see his world shattering around him. Ed Harris complements this perfectly, portraying the feckless commander in the style of Catch-22 without descending into the ludicrous, and injecting a littled much-needed sentimentalism into his beleaguered persona. Scott Glenn protrays the increasingly crazed Top well, though his dialogue of the third act is so profoundly silly that even he struggles to make it sound genuine.
But the great mistake is in casting Anna Paquin as the Top's daughter, who ostensibly eagerly embraces Elwood as a way to get back at her dad for years of repression. Paquin's performance is overly reserved and sallow, while the script seems to call for an extroverted sexual object. When Elwood admits he might be falling in love with Robyn, the audience is completely unconvinced, in large part from the complete lack of chemistry between Phoenix and Paquin. Roger Ebert, normally not given to platitudes, declares that Paquin "has grown up after her debut in 'The Piano' to become one of the most gifted actresses of her generation--particularly in tricky, emotion-straddling roles like this one." The role is tricky and demanding of careful juxtaposition of the sexually liberal and deeply disturbed, but Paquin is not up to the task. Fortunately, her role is confined to the latter half of the film, where the plot has descended to such absurdity that her failure is somewhat obcsured.
In the end, the luminous acting of the three main characters shines through, and a clever wit to the first half of the film gets the audience salivating. But the latter half seems ot have been written only to resolve the moral and practical dilemmas already raised, and the audience learns little more about the surprisingly compelling characters created under the snappy direction of Gregor Jordan. The final episode only reminds the theatregoer of how great the film could have been had the screenwriters cloven more closely to the balance of light and dark comedy in the first half; it is this disappointment of the real potential for a great film that hurts more than the actual failures of the third act plot. Buffalo Soldier is a concept too enamored with its own cleverness and cynicism, and squelches the natural progression of the plot, to its own demise. |
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