Two years after his semi-autobiographical war movie, Platoon, received four Academy Awards (including Best Picture and Best Director), Oliver Stone unveiled his big-screen adaptation of Ron Kovic's memoir about his experiences in Vietnam and his transformation from gung-ho John Wayne wannabe Marine to a disabled and disillusioned veteran and anti-war activist.

Starring Tom Cruise as Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July is the second of the leftist-leaning director's "trilogy" about the Vietnam War (Heaven & Earth, released in 1993, is the third film); it is emotionally searing and cinematically well-done, but it's also somewhat preachy and - not surprising - slanted way too much to the ultra-liberal point of view.

Covering roughly a 13-year span of American history, Born on the Fourth of July follows Kovic's story arc from his last days as a high school senior in Massapequa, Long Island to his appearance as a speaker at the Democratic National Convention in 1976. It is divided into four distinct acts, and - interestingly - has sequences that are subtly tinted with the colors of the American flag, red, white, and blue, that match the emotional context of the scenes.

Though the film begins with a flashback sequence showing young Ron playing "Soldier" with his brothers and friends in Massapequa, the true start of the film is when the-now-played-by-Cruise Kovic is a high school senior - an athlete, no less! - who is the ideal Kennedy-era all-American boy: patriotic, religiously devout, and a true believer in JFK's "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

So after hearing a Marine recruiting sergeant's impassioned presentation during an assembly at his school, young Ron decides to sign up in the Corps, inspired not just by Kennedyesque idealism but also by the then-common desire of most guys to be like movie idol John Wayne. Leaving his lovely girlfriend with a kiss (in the rain and with Henry Mancini's "Moon River" as underscore), off Ron goes for basic training.

Stone, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kovic, is a gifted story teller and knows what to skip over, so the next time we see Ron isn't in Parris Island undergoing basic training nor during his first combat tour in Vietnam. Instead, we've flashed forward five years and into Kovic's second tour in Indochina. Now a sergeant and an experienced squad leader, he's still a true believer in the Cause and the Corps...that is, until two incidents occur that change his attitudes - and his life - forever.

The first involves two terrible and tragic errors during a battle in the Cua Viet Valley. In one case, Kovic and his Marines kill an entire Vietmamese village's inhabitants believing that there were enemy combatants there, while in the other, Kovic accidentally shoots and kills a fellow Marine. When he makes what he deems an honest and morally-right after action report in which he assumes responsibility for his mistakes, his superiors tell him, in effect, to simply forget about it.

Of course, Kovic can't simply forget about it, but he does soldier on...until he is badly wounded in action and left paralyzed from the waist down.

Stone then chronicles the harrowing path Kovic takes as he undergoes a transformation from naive conservative Marine poster boy to bitter disillusioned war vet and activist. Some of the experiences here are illuminating - the scenes that portray the sadly inadequate medical care that returning disabled vets received seem to foreshadow the recent scandal involving conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and the frustrations which stem from Kovic's loss of his sexual abilities due to his most grievous wound are vividly and honestly portrayed.

And though it's understandable that Stone would infuse the film with his own bitterness and disillusion with America after his own Vietnam War experiences, the director takes quite a few liberties with the real story in order to hammer his point across that the Vietnam War was wrong and that our government was dishonest and uncaring about the welfare of the soldiers it sent to Southeast Asia to fight in that "inmoral crusade."

The two most galling distortions in Born on the Fourth of July are worth mentioning, since they do affect my views on this movie and Stone's subsequent film career.

The first abuse of creative license centers on the portrayal of Kovic's mother by Caroline Kava as a religious fanatic who is so conservative she almost resembles a caricature of a Southern Baptist (in one scene, she's shocked when Ron says the word "penis"); when the movie was still in theaters in 1990, there were a few press reports which said that the real Mrs. Kovic was upset at being depicted like a closed-minded nut.

The other loose-with-the-facts bit that bugs me is the portrayal of how Miami Beach Police dealt with the anti-war protests at the 1972 Republican National Convention.

In the film, the police is shown as using excessive force and roughing up Kovic (who by now is wheelchair-bound, long haired, and has a hippie beard-and-mustache thing going on) and some of his fellow anti-war demonstrators. It looks believable enough at first glance and dramatic as all get-out, but it never happened.

On its own merits as a movie, Stone's take on Born on the Fourth of July is very good. The acting, with the exception of Kava's Catholic-crossed-with-caricature-of-Christian-Fundamentalist portrayal of Mrs. Kovic, is excellent; Tom Cruise deservedly got his first Academy Award nomination for his tour de force performance, and Stone cannily cast 11 actors from 1986's Platoon, including Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, Dale Dye, and Mark Moses, in minor but memorable roles.

The film also benefits from one of John Williams' best scores; his Theme from Born on the Fourth of July not only was one of the first orchestral compositions to be featured on a music video on MTV, but its haunting trumpet solo (by Tim Morrison) was borrowed by NBC a little over a year later as underscore for some news coverage of Operation Desert Storm.

Even though I do not agree with Stone's political views and I do think that those views inspired him to distort some of the facts of the real Kovic's story, I'm still going to recommend this movie as a piece of art. It's not always a "pretty" piece of art, mind you; the scenes of war and human suffering are not for the faint of heart, and it's definitely so laced with profanity that a child should not watch it (the F-bomb, in particularly, is tossed out over 200 times in the 145-minute long movie). But, even with its many politically-motivated distortions of fact, Born on the Fourth of July is compelling, well-crafted, and well-acted.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age