Word: stone
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Whereas Platoon had news value, Born on the Fourth of July tells a familiar story; it wants to teach us what we already know. The movie's uniqueness is in its tone. Stone plays director as if he were at a cathedral organ with all the stops out. Each scene, whether it means to elegize or horrify, is unrelenting, unmodulated, rabid with its own righteousness. And yet, frequently, the crazy machine works because of its voluptuous imagery. When Ron is wounded in Viet Nam, he collapses backward, and from his mouth a stream of blood spurts like the fountain...
...Stone's canniest directorial decision was to choose Cruise. The actor remakes himself in the film, trashing preconceptions, showing a range that astonishes. Ron's furious arguments with his family become primal screams of frustrated love. In the Mexican scenes, where Ron meets a prostitute who treats him gently, Cruise's tearful face expresses wonderfully conflicting feelings of joy and fear, peace and release. He makes sense of the story even when the movie doesn't. No wonder that at the end of the filming, Kovic gave | Cruise his Bronze Star. "He gave it to Tom for bravery," Stone says...
...Born on the Fourth of July, Cruise had no Hoffman to play actor's Ping- Pong with. In front of the camera, he was on his own. Behind it, he would be led by two Viet Nam vets, Stone and Kovic. "I chose Tom," Stone says, % "because he was the closest to Ron Kovic in spirit. I sensed that they came from the same working-class Catholic background and had a similarly troubled family history. They certainly had the same drive, the same hunger to achieve, to be the best, to prove something. Like Ron too, Tom is wound real...
Throughout, Stone kept winding Cruise tighter. "I put a lot of pressure on Tom," he says, "maybe too much. I wanted him to read more, visit more hospitals. I wanted him to spend time in that chair, to really feel it. He went to boot camp twice, and I didn't want his foxhole dug by his cousin. At one point I talked him into injecting himself with a solution that would have totally paralyzed him for two days. Then the insurance company -- the killer of all experience -- said no because there was a slight chance that Tom would have...
...thing, the real job of artists of any kind is to somehow seize the life you're having in an unrelinquishing grip." McGuane is sure to continue doing exactly that. But, just in case, he keeps his epitaph handy. His eyes gleam with mischief as he repeats it: "No stone unturned -- except this...