For many actors, moving to Oscar-bait “serious films” after making big money in lighter films is a worn-out cliché. But if Roger Ebert wrote in 1989: “Nothing (Tom) Cruise has done will prepare you for what he does Born on the 4th of July…his performance is so good that the film lives through it”.
In Born on the 4th of July, now streaming on Netflix, Cruise plays Ron Kovic, who fought in Vietnam and came home paralyzed from the waist down. The film is based on his memoir and is directed by another veteran, Oliver Stone. What emerges is a powerful, visceral and haunting story about what happens when young men go to war – and what happens to them when they come home.
War is hell
As Ebert explains, both Kovic and Stone were “bold patriots eager to answer their country’s call to take up arms.” And despite everything they went through, they returned from Vietnam as patriots – patriots offended and angered by the hostility they experienced from the anti-war movement. But Kovic’s experiences at home were terrible – some of which are depicted here in excruciating detail – and he began a spiral of self-destruction. The film follows him all the way to the bottom, and stays with him as he tries to climb back up.
It’s an extraordinary, heartbreaking film that’s much smarter and more thoughtful than most war films. Stone came to this film after it was made PlatoonAnd Born on the 4th of July is a kind of smarter, more nuanced sequel that depicts not only the horrors of war, but also the horrors of post-war life.
Pauline Kael van The New Yorker hated it, but she was in the minority of critics next to the WashingtonPoststating that it was “a passionate film, made with conviction and evangelical fervor. It is also hysterical, presumptuous and alienating”.
Variety described Cruise’s performance as “stunning”, and Rolling stone said that “Stone has found in Cruise the ideal actor to anchor the film with simplicity and power”. Time-out called it a ‘riveting, elegiac film, particularly heartening after the simplified moral of Platoon“. And for The New York Timesit was “the most ambitious non-documentary film yet made about the entire Vietnam experience”.