Lord of War
Winter Soldier
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I always thought this was the most important film we had about this country’s tragic involvement in Vietnam, and I still do. It’s almost as potent today as it was when it was released, and I suspect it’s rarely screened because what it reveals about wartime atrocities and government policies is very hard to face. This is especially true because the soldiers who describe their personal experiences are ordinary Americans and easy to identify with, though at the time some reviewers thought their long hair destroyed their credibility.
The soldiers also describe their fears, their grief at the loss of friends, their frustration at not having been able to understand the languages they heard or distinguish friend from foe. None of this justifies tossing prisoners out of planes, raping and murdering civilians, or randomly burning villages. But it does offer a context in which these and other criminal acts become comprehensible.
Near the other end of the production-values spectrum is Andrew Niccol’s Lord of War, a caustic satire masquerading as an action adventure. Or maybe it’s Hollywood escapism masquerading as satire, but to the extent that it’s this it’s less satisfying. It stars Nicolas Cage–who coproduced and, according to Niccol, made the film possible–as Yuri, a Ukrainian arms dealer whose family fled to New York’s Little Odessa in 1980, pretending to be Jewish.
