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USA 1993
Directed by
Oliver Stone
138 minutes
Rated M

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
2.5 stars

Heaven And Earth

Oliver Stone clearly and rightly regards the Vietnam war as one of the great tragedies of the second half of the twentieth century. With Heaven & Earth the third film that he has made about the war (the previous two being Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) he looks at how it affected the life of a Vietnamese peasant woman.

The film follows Le Ly (Hiep Thi Le) as her apparently timeless life in the Central Highlands of Vietnam is destroyed by the war during she meets and marries an American soldier, Steve Butler(Tommy Lee Jones), who takes her back to his home in California. They have two boys together but with Steve unable to cope with PTSD, the marriage breaks down and Le Ly realizes that she has to make her own way in life.

The film is palpably a work of commitment and in its latter stages it hits the target though Stone spends too much time on the historical context and horrors of the war which have been catalogued many times before and not enough on the specifics of Le Ly’s story which hopefully would have resulted in a better film.

The trouble is that, somewhat ironically given that the script was adapted by Stone from two books by Le Ly herself, the film records but never really engages with her experiences. One would have thought that being Vietnamese would have brought her more difficulties in post-Vietnam America but bar one rather unlikely scene at Steve’s family’s dinner table this not addressed.  Perhaps this is largely due to the fact that Thi Le had no previous acting experience though as such she turns in a strong performance. Particularly in the meatiest part of the film, Le Ly’s relationship with the profoundly conflicted Steve, who expects her to behave as an “Oriental” wife, she holds her own with Jones, no small achievement for any actor

Stone enjoys satirizing American consumer culture – a mixture of crass excess and forced boorish generosity, garishly kitsch home decoration, a double door fridge crammed with food and laden supermarket shelves that seem to stretch for ever and so on  - but one can’t help but feel that he has too easily let Le Ly’s emotional journey remain on the page leaving Heaven & Earth a somewhat unremarkable film.

 

 

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