Word: ron
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...goes off to war and sees a slaughtered Vietnamese family. In the chaos of a skirmish, he kills one of his own men. Paralyzed from the chest down, he finds his sex life over before it begins. In horrifying rants, he abuses his parents, his country and himself. This Ron is not a nice person or even, in his hippie garb, a nice-looking one. Moviegoers who expect to find the best of America in Cruise's face will instead discover a haunting mug shot of the nation's Viet Nam nightmare...
...film spans two decades, beginning on July 4, 1956. Ron Kovic's tenth birthday is the U.S.'s 180th, and his hometown of Massapequa, N.Y., is parading its patriotism down Main Street. Disabled veterans are wheeled out, including one (played by the real Kovic, co-author of the film's screenplay) who flinches at the sound of a firecracker. It must remind him of a war that demands elegies. But young Ron -- too busy watching skyrockets that night to pay attention to a first kiss from his precocious friend Donna -- sees organized gunplay as the short road to manly glory...
...Ron knows only what he has been taught: by his family's suffocatingly pious Catholicism, by the suave belligerence of President Kennedy's Inaugural Address, by his drill sergeant of a high school wrestling coach, by the Marine recruiter looking for a few good men. Men! Ron wants to be one of them, in the nifty new theater called Viet Nam. He hardly has time for a dance at the senior prom -- just a promise of sexual pleasures with sweet Donna (Kyra Sedgwick), deferred till after he has done his duty. After he finds his manhood...
Instead of finding it, he loses it, and so much else: his unexamined ideals, his blinkered innocence, his respect for those who still believe the lies that nurtured him. Ron would give up all those values just to be whole again. The film spends only 17 minutes in Viet Nam, but the war overshadows all that precedes and follows...
Here, the disasters of war are at home. The Bronx veterans' hospital where Ron is sent to recuperate is an open sewer teeming with rats, drugs and whores. Back in Massapequa, Ron is now the flinching veteran used as a prop for patriotism, and family life is a ceaseless, sickening debate about the war. Even in Mexico, at a kind of seraglio for impotent veterans, he finds little sympathy among his own crippled kind. He looks into the angry face of his buddy Charlie (Willem Dafoe) and finds a mirror of his own grotesque despair. He has hit bottom...