Vietnam determinedly enlightens Dalton Trumbo's repossession of old ground in the era of MASH and Catch-22. Trumbo's Johnny is, yes indeed, a guy named Joe, once a baker supporting his family, smitten with gentle Teresa Wright or Greer Garson-style girl, who joins the army because, why, "it's the sort of thing a fella oughta do, when his country is in trouble." All these familial figures are in essence Norman Rockwell collectibles. What a contrast when, in the trenches, he's sent on a round to hide a carcass that affronts a colonel's sense of smell. A shell lands near him. This is his last memory before he, regrettably, awoke, in a hospital.
The army is satisfied he has no cognizant mind. They resolve to keep him breathing only to study him. But he's cognizant all right, and little by little he becomes so of the horror of his wounds. He's literally captive within his mind, for a desperate eternity to anyone with no available concept of time, until he discovers a way of communicating with a compassionate nurse. Trumbo avails himself of a brilliant fast-cutting sequence, in a sense the sort one frequently sees in edgy late '60s and early '70s movies, but a particularly incisive and acute portrayal of mental disorientation, Bottoms struggling to organize his new life's routine without the aid of any physical outlet, no anchor for his thoughts, struggling to file them with constant bewildering disturbances and loss of bearings. Even telling day from night is a mystery for him to solve.
The upsetting premise benefits from Paths of Glory, La Jetée and the story of Helen Keller, but in no way does he tell his story in anything but the most inimitable way. Never before or since this film have we seen anything much like it. Because of Trumbo's determination to render the most exacting possible depiction of Bottoms' unique perception, there is even a transitional effect unique to this film, a fade to yellow when he feels the sun for the first time since his injuries. This truly unique work also unearths probably the most inventive use of voice-over I might've ever heard: He describes people we see as vibrations. When two nurses enter, he claims that now there are two vibrations. In a clever smidgen of much-needed levity, one nurse is fat, and he supposes it's a man.
A story that authentically imparts the loneliest possible consciousness, one where the subject can't even be sure whether or not he's alive, Trumbo draws on flashbacks and flights of a deserted, despairing imagination to make Joe alive for us, as he subsists in a living death. Evincing what could perhaps be argued as a level of bitterness in respect to the filming of Trumbo's human war tales in the past, or simply a yearning for the naivete of the old days, some memories and fantasies recreate the 1940s melodrama use of music, soft lens, close-ups and prosy dialogue. Then we find some of the brutal realities of real-life scenes are muted by some of that classic technique after awhile as well. The most pleasant flashback is the first, when Joe and his girl kiss in her living room and are cut short by her father, who sends them to her room, where there's a love scene of such softness and splendor that its resonance ring through the whole film. Representing Trumbo's own awe at his character is Donald Sutherland's Jesus, who counsels Joe in a celestial milieu more akin to how Trumbo might've truly wanted to portray the same fantasy in A Guy Named Joe over thirty years before.
Christ actually doesn't have much to put forward. He has no solutions because there are none. Indeed, the film closes with no political answers and without, as a matter of fact, even a political outlook. It purely presents a set of circumstances. Here was a loyal young American who went off and was hideously injured for no grand cause, and whose alert mind lives on as a staggering condemnation of powers that be who sent all the young men away to do this to one another.
The army is satisfied he has no cognizant mind. They resolve to keep him breathing only to study him. But he's cognizant all right, and little by little he becomes so of the horror of his wounds. He's literally captive within his mind, for a desperate eternity to anyone with no available concept of time, until he discovers a way of communicating with a compassionate nurse. Trumbo avails himself of a brilliant fast-cutting sequence, in a sense the sort one frequently sees in edgy late '60s and early '70s movies, but a particularly incisive and acute portrayal of mental disorientation, Bottoms struggling to organize his new life's routine without the aid of any physical outlet, no anchor for his thoughts, struggling to file them with constant bewildering disturbances and loss of bearings. Even telling day from night is a mystery for him to solve.
The upsetting premise benefits from Paths of Glory, La Jetée and the story of Helen Keller, but in no way does he tell his story in anything but the most inimitable way. Never before or since this film have we seen anything much like it. Because of Trumbo's determination to render the most exacting possible depiction of Bottoms' unique perception, there is even a transitional effect unique to this film, a fade to yellow when he feels the sun for the first time since his injuries. This truly unique work also unearths probably the most inventive use of voice-over I might've ever heard: He describes people we see as vibrations. When two nurses enter, he claims that now there are two vibrations. In a clever smidgen of much-needed levity, one nurse is fat, and he supposes it's a man.
A story that authentically imparts the loneliest possible consciousness, one where the subject can't even be sure whether or not he's alive, Trumbo draws on flashbacks and flights of a deserted, despairing imagination to make Joe alive for us, as he subsists in a living death. Evincing what could perhaps be argued as a level of bitterness in respect to the filming of Trumbo's human war tales in the past, or simply a yearning for the naivete of the old days, some memories and fantasies recreate the 1940s melodrama use of music, soft lens, close-ups and prosy dialogue. Then we find some of the brutal realities of real-life scenes are muted by some of that classic technique after awhile as well. The most pleasant flashback is the first, when Joe and his girl kiss in her living room and are cut short by her father, who sends them to her room, where there's a love scene of such softness and splendor that its resonance ring through the whole film. Representing Trumbo's own awe at his character is Donald Sutherland's Jesus, who counsels Joe in a celestial milieu more akin to how Trumbo might've truly wanted to portray the same fantasy in A Guy Named Joe over thirty years before.
Christ actually doesn't have much to put forward. He has no solutions because there are none. Indeed, the film closes with no political answers and without, as a matter of fact, even a political outlook. It purely presents a set of circumstances. Here was a loyal young American who went off and was hideously injured for no grand cause, and whose alert mind lives on as a staggering condemnation of powers that be who sent all the young men away to do this to one another.