I Can't Handle It: Re-Examining A Few Good Men and the Writing of Aaron Sorkin [Lex]

A film school professor of mine often asked, “What is a movie you are supposed to like but cannot stand?” His answer: Federico Fellini’s 8 ½. He found the main character Guido execrable, and all of Fellini’s magical realism could not cast a spell to overcome his dislike of the lead.

There are many foreign, art, and independent films I know I am supposed to admire. But let’s face it: you need a lot of patience to watch Tarkovsky or Warhol or Cassavetes or Bresson.

In the Hollywood canon of all-time greats, there are movies I find slow or unengaging (Apocalypse Now, The Apartment), but I still respect them.

But after all these years (I graduated film school in 1998), there has been no highly praised movie I could not abide. Until recently.

And that is A Few Good Men.
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Enmity did not come right away. Released in 1991, I do not remember having strong feelings either way about A Few Good Men. Like most, the story intrigued and entertained me.

On the surface, everything about the picture meets the highest standards of film-making. It took me some time, however, to realize the writing does not.

How can I say the writing in A Few Good Men is anything but first class? After all, Hollywood darling Aaron Sorkin penned the screenplay. He is perhaps the best known industry writer since William Goldman.

The characters and dialogue in the movie stand out as some of Hollywood's most memorable, and countless screenwriting programs, seminars, and textbooks hold up the script as something to emulate.

But A Few Good Men is insincere and manipulative.

Strong words I know, but allow me to present my case, your honor.
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The film begins at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba where two Marines administer a beating to a fellow Marine, who later dies. We cut from the attack to Washington D.C, where we see a flapping American flag followed by some fascinating rifle exercises—both set against upbeat, martial music. Seems harmless, but there is already mocking of the military underway. A ghastly assault and an immediate cut to the flag coupled with pomp and circumstance.

Walking past the rifle exercises is Lt. Commander Galloway (played by Demi Moore). A JAG lawyer, she wants to defend the two accused Marines and seeks permission from her superiors to be assigned the case.

No doubt the Captain of this unit is a sexist jerk, but when Galloway first walks in and he offers her a seat, she stupidly refuses it. After being treated like a little girl, her superiors assign the case to Lt. Caffey (Tom Cruise), believing she is too inexperienced to be the lead defense counsel.

We meet Caffey at a softball practice. A prosecuting attorney is there to discuss a case because Caffey did not bother to show up at his office. Caffey belittles the prosecutor while simultaneously plea-bargaining and hitting grounders.

Of course, it is more interesting to have this scene play out on a softball field as opposed to a stuffy office, but the opening sequence sets the table for the entire film where everyone treats everyone else contemptuously or dismissively or confrontationally—and almost always without good reason.

This tone is what caused me to turn on the film after repeated viewings. Sorkin has the characters behave the way he wants them to, for his own purposes, not how they should organically be for themselves.

Only someone writing with an agenda would craft characters and dialogue this way. Did Sorkin’s committed leftism perhaps drive him to write an anti-Corps movie? Or maybe he prefers this style and understands glib and confrontational characters will always strike a chord with audiences.

It is not my goal to see into his mind, and there is certainly nothing wrong with an agenda-driven script. I am only stating my reaction to it upon repeated viewings, and I believe it is far overpraised due to its callowness.

I am not going to breakdown the rest of the movie. I am working on the assumption most cinephiles have seen A Few Good Men. But I do not have to describe any more of the film because the important thing to note is its tone, which, to me, comes from a place of cynicism and almost never waivers from this inauthentic posture.

Caffey treats everyone with nauseating ennui. His co-counsel, Lt. Weinberg (Kevin Pollack) is an insouciant wiseass. The two accused men, Corporal Dawson (Wolfgang Bodison) and PFC Downey (James Marshall) are both unbelievably robotic even in the face of the charges against them. Caffey talks down to Dawson and Downey, while they are, respectively, stubborn and moronic.

When we ultimately meet the senior Marine officers at Guantanamo Bay—Lt. Kendrick (Kiefer Sutherland), Lt. Col. Markinson (J.T. Walsh), and of course the infamous Col. Jessup (Jack Nicholson)—who set the crime in motion, there is not even the pretense of depicting them as sane men.

Spoiler alert in case you are one of the few who have not seen the film. The senior officers ordered Dawson and Downey to carry out the assault that led to the death of their fellow Marine. Besides being unrepentant sadists—leaving out Markinson who wants to do the right thing but is too weak to push back—the three officers seem to loathe one another and goad each other with threats and disparagement.

All I have described occurs in the first twenty minutes of the movie, and it does not change for the next two hours.
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Were A Few Good Men a parody or satire, this tenor might be more understandable, but it is a straightly played drama, so its defining quality is sheer manipulation.
What am I talking about? All storytelling is manipulation to a certain degree.

When we watch a movie, we suspend our disbelief that the actors are pretending. We are all open to manipulation as consumers of any story. Yet there is a point at which this deference is beyond rescue.

I have friends who are perfectly happy with even the stupidest iteration of the Fast and Furious characters. Over the course of the franchise, the characters went from street-car mechanics to space shuttle pilots, and that does not seem to bother some.

In A Few Good Men, we are not dealing with an offbeat or even absurdist gestalt where human behavior as we know it might not apply. Instead, the film styles itself as an accurate depiction of the Marine Corps—JAG officers in particular. The technical details are flawless, but the portrayal of the characters and the dialogue undercut any fealty to the milieu.
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If you look at most of Sorkin’s work, this is not an isolated case. From his TV series (The West Wing and The Newsroom), and other films such as The American President –perhaps the most cloying and pretentious in his oeuvre—Sorkin cannot seem to help himself. All of his heroes (and antagonists) are over-stylized to the point where their personas and behavior do not feel authentic to the world they inhabit.

To Sorkin’s credit, he is very crafty about hiding his bias and tactics in A Few Good Men. I think that is why the film does not catch as much flak as it should. Because his sleight-of-hand fools viewers—and I counted myself in this category for a long time. He is distracting you with slick dialogue, oodles of conflict, and plot twists. In this sense, he has done a great job as a writer, but at least I, for one, must reveal the prestidigitation is just that.
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What exactly changed my view of this movie? How did I come to see that A Few Good Men is an unserious fantasy instead of the hard hitting drama most believe it to be?

I do not believe it is my political leanings, which are conservative. A Few Good Men is decidedly anti-Marine Corps, but I greatly admire Full Metal Jacket and Platoon, and those movies are also not kind when it comes to their depiction of the Corps or the armed forces.

However, while these films are unsparing in their criticism of the military, one never gets the feeling the writers, directors, or producers have inserted themselves into the drama. It does not seem to be enough for Sorkin to tell the story of a crime committed in the ranks of the Marine Corps. In A Few Good Men he wants his voice to be part of that story as well, and it just does not wash.

And if it is not politics, I think my beef with the movie is more a personal reckoning with Hollywood. Not only is the industry a system that creates myths on screen but also off it. Hagiography has always been part of the game, but Sorkin and others have been over-hyped to the extent the system cannot admit it has been reckless with its king-making.

This is especially true when a film earns a lot of money or wins awards. Think ‘The New York Times’ winning Pulitzers for reporting on Russian collusion. It would take profound humility to confess to being gullible, or, worse, culpable, so the path of least resistance is to go along with the conventional wisdom that A Few Good Men is a work of brilliance.

Or perhaps I always had these reservations and did not want to be that guy: the one who is hating on everyone else’s darling. But no longer. I am calling A Few Good Men to the stand where I am exposing it for the juvenile piece of work it is.

I am not sure my film professor had quite this length and breadth of explanation in mind when he posed the question about movies you are supposed to like but cannot stand, but I finally, and without hesitation, have been able to submit this one.
What about you? What truth (or movie) can you not handle?

posted by Open Blogger at 07:30 PM

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