R | 2h 5m | Drama | 2002
Gregory Hoblit’s World War II film is about soldiers salvaging a bit of themselves from the shambles of war and sometimes leading fellow soldiers on that journey.
In the film, German soldiers capture and force young, U.S. Intelligence officer Lt. Thomas Hart (Colin Farrell) to divulge Allied fuel dump locations, then move him to a camp with other Allied POWs. The entry of two black officers as prisoners in an otherwise all-white camp triggers a chain of events. Hart believes that the lone racist white soldier, Vic Bedford (Cole Hauser), framed both black officers. One is executed by Nazis for allegedly smuggling a potential weapon into his barracks; Hart believes that a spiteful Bedford planted it. The other, Lt. Lincoln Scott (Terrence Howard) is court-martialed, for allegedly murdering Bedford in retaliation.
Scott doesn’t expect justice. The court-martial feels like a charade run by the highest-ranking POW on camp, Col. William McNamara (Bruce Willis), who appoints Hart, a novice fresh out of law school, as defense counsel, and a seasoned army lawyer as prosecution counsel. Worse, McNamara himself plays judge. Then, as Hart valiantly marshals the truth in full view of the Nazis, he discovers that McNamara has been marshaling a larger truth, meant to be hidden from the Nazis.
Camp commander, Werner Visser (Marcel Iures), who studied at Yale, reads Mark Twain, and listens to jazz, seems more amused than angry at what his American POWs are up to. Cinematically, that softens the German edge sufficiently to allow the drama within the American corner to come alive.
The film draws on John Katzenbach’s novel, and Mr. Katzenbach, in turn, drew partly on his U.S. Attorney General father’s experiences as a POW. That isn’t the only link to POW camps. Col. Hal Cook, one of the film’s advisers, had been a POW in the same camp as the older Katzenbach, and several film crew had parents or grandparents who’d been POWs.
War Is Personal
The film’s gritty look and feel honors the experience of veterans who had braved extreme weather, starvation, isolation, disease, uncertainty, and suffocating crowding.Many twists aren’t convincing. Still, the film engrossingly depicts two stages that a soldier goes through as he’s offered chances to acquire the highest values: duty, honor, sacrifice, courage, and patriotism. The first, is before the war, when family or university shape him; here, that’s only implied as Hart’s father is a respected senator, and McNamara is a fourth-generation military man. The second, during war, is when a soldier is left to act on his own and stand by those actions; here, that’s explicit as, heroically, Hart, McNamara, and Scott end up standing alone at different points, and in different ways.
The film asks: Will soldiers let the seeming senselessness of war define them, as Bedford does? Or as Hart, McNamara, Scott, and others do, will they shape it in their own image, making it just and dignified by their presence, even in unjust, undignified circumstances? Hart, as the central character, seems to say that war may be public in the end, but first, it’s personal. The war of values inside a man decides if and how the finest values prevail outside him.
In a searing scene, a Nazi-commandeered train transports POWs, packed into coaches like sardines. P-51 Mustangs flying overhead can’t see the “POW” letters on the now snow-covered train roof. They start raining bombs. Scattered briefly, the POWs regroup as one man to honor the dead and protect the injured splayed across the debris-strewn tracks. As the planes swoop down for another attack, they swoop up just in time on seeing fellow soldiers below, standing in the shivering cold, spelling out P.O.W in formation with their bodies.
Mr. Hoblit is saying that soldiers are ultimately more than the insignia on their lapels or peaked hats, more than the stripes on their shoulders, and much more than the color of their uniforms, or their skins. They’re just men, fighting, as honorably as possible, to protect the lives of their countrymen, by offering their own.
