Throughout George W. Bush’s second term, journalists puzzled
over why, even after opinion polls showed Americans to have soured
on the Iraq war, no serious antiwar movement emerged. More
recently, journalists have puzzled over why movies about the Iraq
war have done badly at the box office. The second question holds
some clues to the first.
A July 2007 article by Michael Cieply of the New
York Times, titled “While Real Bullets Fly, Movies Bring
War Home,” typifies the genre. The peg was the impending release of
In the Valley of Elah, a fictional film inspired by the
real-life murder of an Army specialist by fellow Iraq veterans
during a night of drinking near Fort Benning, Georgia. “Some in
Hollywood want moviegoers to decide if the killing is emblematic of
a war gone bad,” Cieply explained.
Moviegoers weren’t interested. In the Valley of Elah
opened that September and grossed a mere $6.8 million nationwide.
Even then, it was far from the least successful such film. As
Cieply had noted, Irwin Winkler, director of Home of
the Brave, a 2006 Iraq movie that had taken in just
$44,000, “speculated that the audience might prefer a longer
interval before viewing events as troubling as war.” Cieply
agreed:
In the past, Hollywood usually gave the veteran more breathing
space. William Wyler’s “[The] Best Years of Our Lives,” about the
travails of those returning from World War II, was released more
than a year after the war’s end. Similarly Hal Ashby’s “Coming
Home” and Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July,” both stories
of Vietnam veterans, came well after the fall of Saigon.
But this year a successful Iraq movie appeared, albeit on
premium cable rather than in theaters. HBO’s February 21 premiere
of Taking Chance drew two million viewers, making it the
network’s most-watched original movie in five years—and on a
Saturday, no less. Within three weeks, another 5.5 million had
watched.
Taking Chance dramatizes the story of a Marine colonel,
Michael Strobl, who volunteered to escort the remains of Lance
Corporal Chance Phelps from Dover Air Force Base to Phelps’s
hometown in Wyoming after the 19-year-old Phelps’s combat death in
2004. The film’s ending is utterly predictable, but the portrayal
of the journey is gripping for its depiction of the care the
military shows for Phelps’s body and his personal effects, the
seriousness with which Strobl (played by Kevin Bacon) takes his
mission, and especially the reactions he draws from ordinary Ameri
cans as he proceeds across the country.
“We support the troops” is too often an empty slogan, but
Taking Chance gives it substance. As Strobl travels from
Delaware to Wyoming by way of Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and
Billings, Montana, almost everyone he meets regards him with a
heightened respect, thanking him for his service and for Phelps’s
sacrifice. (The lone exception— a sign of the times—is an officious
airport security officer, who balks at Strobl’s insistence on not
removing his uniform jacket or sending Phelps’s possessions through
the metal detector.)
The Times’s Cieply noted Taking Chance in
passing in a December 2008 report on the Sundance Film Festival,
where it was screened. Director Ross Katz told Cieply that his film
(in the reporter’s paraphrase) “stands apart from the heavy run of
antiwar pictures that have populated festivals for years.”
Yet it is not a pro-war movie. A few characters express opinions
on the war, both for and against, but the film’s perspective is
neutral. Taking Chance succeeds where other Iraq movies
failed because it is consistent with the national mood—as were
other successful films after other wars.
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) portrays
three men of varying ages readjusting to civilian life after
returning from World War II. Each faces serious personal or
professional challenges, but by the end all three seem on course
for a brighter future. The Best Years of Our
Lives, like Taking Chance, is apolitical— except for
one scene in which a young Navy veteran who lost both his arms
(played by Harold Russell, who lost his arms in a 1944 Army
training accident) is confronted at a drugstore soda counter by an
isolationist who tells him his injuries were in vain:
“The Germans and the Japs had nothing against us. They just
wanted to fight the Limeys and the Reds.” Afterward, the soda jerk,
a fellow veteran, remarks, “You read about guys like that, but you
don’t often see ’em.”
In 1946, it was common for men to have served, and support for
the war was nearly universal.
Vietnam was much more contentious, and Coming
Home (1978) pushed the antiwar message with a vengeance.
The film centers on the humiliation and suicide of a career Army
officer played by Bruce Dern, who ships out to Vietnam, leaving his
wife (Jane Fonda) behind. Fonda, bored, volunteers at the local
veterans’ hospital, where she encounters a bitter, crippled vet
played by Jon Voight.
Fonda and Voight meet cute when they collide in a hospital
hallway and his catheter drainage bag is dislodged, falling to the
floor and splashing her with his waste. Soon he shows his sensitive
side and becomes number one in her heart. When Fonda and Voight
consummate their affair, the screenwriters, not satisfied with
cuckolding Dern, have Fonda tell Voight—and the world—that her
husband never gave her an orgasm.
Dern returns from Vietnam, learns of the affair, and receives a
medal for accidentally shooting himself in the leg. His wife has
betrayed him, his military career is at a dead end, and he is, in
his own mind, a phony. He goes to the beach, removes his uniform
and wedding ring, and wades naked into the Pacific, never to
return. Voight, meanwhile, finds inner peace by visiting high
schools, where he gives speeches denouncing the war and urging
students not to enlist.
To watch Coming Home three decades later is a
distasteful experience. But the film was quite popular at the time,
grossing some $32.7 million domestically, roughly 15 times the take
of In the Valley of Elah after adjusting for
inflation. One can see why it drew an audience. In 1978, there were
a lot of educated men in their 20s who had avoided the draft and
were vulnerable to accusations that they had shirked their
patriotic duty. Coming Home flattered them by telling them
that they were better than those who served—not only morally but
sexually.
The Vietnam-era antiwar movement was politically potent because
it was driven in large part by self-interest. Young men opposed the
war because they didn’t want to be drafted; young women, because
they didn’t want their men to be. The advent of the all-volunteer
military redefined service as a supererogatory act rather than a
duty.
Today only those with an ideological ax to grind—including many
journalists and filmmakers— have an interest in perpetuating
derogatory stereotypes of servicemen. As the Wall Street
Journal noted in an editorial, “If Hollywood wants to make war
movies that appeal to a broad audience, it could do worse than to
take in ‘Taking Chance.’ The Americans who show Colonel Strobl such
reverence as he makes his way west are the very audience Hollywood
wishes it could reach.”
