Long overdue Hollywood solemnization of the Gulf War. The investigation of the first woman nominated (posthumously) for a combat Medal of Honor is expected to be a rubber-stamp procedure, leading posthaste to a photo-op at the White House, with the President draping the ribbon round the neck of the dead soldier's daughter. Good for her, good for him, good for everybody. Discrepancies, however, emerge in the eyewitness accounts of her surviving comrades, thus affording Meg Ryan a chance, in Rashomon-like flashbacks, to roam the range from "butch" to "crybaby," and providing her, at the same time, with a built-in buffer against her (so to speak) natural falseness: she is only seen through others' mouths. The slogging investigation holds our interest, or anyhow the slogging investigator does: Denzel Washington, as attractive and impressive as always, even though tortured by his own sense of culpability in a friendly-fire incident during the war, and deeply submersed in hard liquor. Once the truth comes out, the courage in the title appears too horribly tainted -- by the surrounding cravenness and outright villainy, as well as by the after-the-fact political opportunism -- to sustain the chest-swelling, button-popping crescendo of the final reel. A portrait of courage, for sure. But the blotches dominate the composition. With Lou Diamond Phillips; written by Patrick Sheane Duncan; directed by Edward Zwick. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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