Preview
BUFFALO SOLDIERS
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Ed Harris and Anna Paquin
Directed by Gregor Jordan.
Opens Friday, October 10
Uptown Screen
How’s this for timing? A black comedy set on a lawless U.S. army base in late-’80s West Germany, Buffalo Soldiers made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on the evening of September 8, 2001. Responding to healthy buzz, Miramax bought the movie two days later, much to the elation of Gregor Jordan, who spent three years making Buffalo Soldiers without a distributor on board.
The Australian director planned to attend the film’s second public screening early on September 11 (which is when I first saw it, spending one last morning in blissful ignorance of CNN’s news assault). But then, says Jordan in a recent interview, "everything turned upside down" and the events of that day created a difficult context for a movie in which American soldiers are depicted almost exclusively as con artists, junkies and violent psychopaths.
"I knew that this film would be pretty tricky to distribute and market at the best of times," says Jordan. "It’s an anti-hero story about an unconventional subject. It’s also a film that raises issues about the nature of war. I knew it was gonna be affected by September 11, but I had a feeling that a day would come when the film would become topical in a way that it couldn’t be before."
Jordan had to wait two years for that day. In the meantime, he made another movie (Ned Kelly with Heath Ledger, who also starred in Jordan’s 1999 debut Two Hands) and weathered rumours that Miramax would rather bury Buffalo Soldiers than risk its neck over a movie that could easily be perceived as "un-American." Instead, the studio is finally giving audiences the chance to see a different view of war than the one provided by the news channels.
"A lot of people have been telling (me) that now is the best time ever to release it because war and the military are what people are thinking about all the time now," says Jordan. "This seems to be a time when people are really asking some questions about this kind of thing. And Buffalo Soldiers is a movie that asks questions."
Recent events have also transformed Buffalo Soldiers into something of a period piece. Based on a novel by Robert O’Connor, it is set in a time when the U.S. military was hobbled by corruption, drug problems and racial strife. Elwood (Joaquin Phoenix) is a private on a base near Stuttgart who, when not serving as chief chemist for the base’s heroin operation, sells army surplus on the local black market. The opportunity to make big money off a few truckloads of "missing" weapons coincides with the arrival of Sergeant Lee (Scott Glenn), a hard-ass Vietnam vet who poses a much greater threat to Elwood’s livelihood than the base’s dim-witted commander (Ed Harris). Elwood baits his new adversary by dating his daughter Robyn (Anna Paquin), but circumstances rapidly move beyond the young shyster’s control.
According to Jordan, the morally flexible yet charming Elwood was patterned after "everyone from Milo Minderbinder to Cool Hand Luke to Scarface and even Ferris Bueller." Phoenix’s charisma in the role, the film’s Fight Club-style visual panache and a Public Enemy-heavy soundtrack give Buffalo Soldiers great exuberance. Rather than replicate the "dark and brooding" nature of O’Connor’s book, Jordan says he sought to "make it slightly more upbeat and fun. Though I didn’t want send the message out that what was going on here was cool and OK," he adds.
Like Elwood, viewers come to realize that there’s a downside to drug-dealing and gun-running. Though some of that energy peters out in the fuzzy final act, Buffalo Soldiers remains an enjoyably savage cautionary tale about what can happen to warlike men in a time of peace. Obviously that’s not a problem for the U.S. military now, and as Jordan points out, a man as deadly as Sergeant Lee would discover a renewed sense of purpose.
"In a way, that’s the kind of character you want fighting your wars for you," says Jordan. "He’s a guy who really enjoys warfare – the concept of killing is just part of his job. With an enemy to focus on, he’s an extremely formidable soldier. But if you take that same character out of a war context, he’s a fucking homicidal psychopath."
The son of an Australian air force pilot who fought in Vietnam, Jordan grew up on military bases. His experiences taught him that many of the popular myths about warfare were wrong-headed.
"I grew up with this perception that Vietnam was this terrible, terrible thing that no one wanted to talk about because it was too traumatic for the people who went there," he says. "But my father – who’s not a nasty, violent, warlike person – didn’t talk about it that way. In fact, if you asked him about Vietnam, it was difficult to get him to shut up about it. His whole training was about war.
"Let’s not pretend that military training is about anything else," Jordan adds. "They try to say it’s about acquiring skills you can use afterwards and getting a sense of discipline and honour and whatever, but the day-to-day thing is about the art of warfare. If you’re trained to go to war for five years and then you go, then you don’t see war as this terrible thing – my dad didn’t. He saw some horrible things and had friends die, but my guess is that he perceived war as simply something he did."
That line of thinking runs throughout Buffalo Soldiers, which is not so much an antiwar satire as a frank, flip examination of the people who thrive in the culture that war creates. (Peace, of course, is regarded as an unfortunate lull between bouts of killing.) As such, it would be topical in any age.
"The fact that certain people are saying the film is somehow unpatriotic is just ridiculous," says Jordan. "That says more about them than it does about the actual film. It’s the same film that came out in 2001, but no one found it offensive then. I don’t think the film’s particularly political at all. It’s actually about something that goes beyond politics, which are the reasons why people want to keep on fighting, and how a lot of people out there really like and want war." |
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