A post-Vietnam warm-over, never brought to a level much warmer than luke. The now teenage daughter of a wartime casualty wants to find out what all the shooting was for. Her unemployed uncle, and very permissive guardian, would seem to have some of the answers -- he and his fellow veterans around town -- but he and they are very hush-hush (or shush-shush) about it. A packet of letters found in an old shoebox and a frontline diary -- triggering flashbacks that suggest almost psychic powers on the part of the teenager -- get the ball rolling a little better. But never for long, or very far, or very fast. The movie, composed mostly of idle and disconnected dabs of local color, is slowed down not so much by reticence as by garrulity: and not just any sort of garrulity, but an affectedly literary sort in a supposedly commonfolk idiom ("You gonna marry that boy done all them jump shots against Libertyville?"). The ending, a pilgrimage to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., turns out to be worthwhile, and worth waiting for, not for any dramatic reasons but for purely documentary ones. The surrounding setting of the monument, the possible perspectives on it, the scale of the thing, the small private forms of communion that go on at the various sections of it -- all that is well caught. (If the moment moves you beyond mere educational gratitude, the credit ought probably to go to the surflike pummeling you get from James Horner's music, in his reverential Hoosiers mode.) This ending deserved, however, a better preamble. In the whole time leading up to it, Norman Jewison's visual style effects a fender-crunching blend of primitive symbolism and state-of-the-art glossiness. With Emily Lloyd and Bruce Willis. (1989) — Duncan Shepherd
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