Word: ron
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Ron, regeneration is painful and partial. He never, in the film, reconciles with his parents; there is no fade-out kiss with Donna. His conscience has more urgent needs. To expiate the guilt of killing a fellow soldier, he must confess to the boy's family. To purge his horror of the village massacre, he must speak out against the war. He infiltrates the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami Beach and gets on TV. When a security guard dumps Ron out of his wheelchair, he fights back with a Marine's heedless bravery. "We're gonna take the hall back...
...tone. Stone plays director as if he were at a cathedral organ with all the stops out. Each scene, whether it means to elegize or horrify, is unrelenting, unmodulated, rabid with its own righteousness. And yet, frequently, the crazy machine works because of its voluptuous imagery. When Ron is wounded in Viet Nam, he collapses backward, and from his mouth a stream of blood spurts like the fountain of lost youth. The hospital sequence is an insider's tour of hell, and the Mexican brothel is an endless emotional purgatory...
Stone's canniest directorial decision was to choose Cruise. The actor remakes himself in the film, trashing preconceptions, showing a range that astonishes. Ron's furious arguments with his family become primal screams of frustrated love. In the Mexican scenes, where Ron meets a prostitute who treats him gently, Cruise's tearful face expresses wonderfully conflicting feelings of joy and fear, peace and release. He makes sense of the story even when the movie doesn't. No wonder that at the end of the filming, Kovic gave | Cruise his Bronze Star. "He gave it to Tom for bravery," Stone says...
...Fourth of July, Cruise had no Hoffman to play actor's Ping- Pong with. In front of the camera, he was on his own. Behind it, he would be led by two Viet Nam vets, Stone and Kovic. "I chose Tom," Stone says, % "because he was the closest to Ron Kovic in spirit. I sensed that they came from the same working-class Catholic background and had a similarly troubled family history. They certainly had the same drive, the same hunger to achieve, to be the best, to prove something. Like Ron too, Tom is wound real tight. And what...
...held his own against Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Cruise is Hollywood's biggest attraction, and he is about to be acclaimed one of its best actors. In Born on the Fourth of July, he displays rage and range as Viet Nam veteran Ron Kovic. For the engaging, intense young star, life has never been sweeter...