Word: viet
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Born on the Fourth of July is the true story of Ron Kovic, a kid from Long Island, N.Y., who got his spine shattered in Viet Nam. Back home he became bitter, questioning his old values of family and patriotism, before convincing himself he could best serve his country as a squad leader in the war against the war. This morality play could be a turnoff if it weren't for Cruise's presence. Says Tom Pollock, head of Universal Pictures, the film's patron: "Tom Cruise is all America's all-American boy. The film's journey is more...
...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...
...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...
...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...