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Born On The Fourth Of July
1989
A drama based on the true story by Ron Kovic of a young soldier who returns from Vietnam paralysed. Read more
| Starring | Tom Cruise, Willem Dafoe, Kyra Sedgwick, Raymond Barry |
|---|---|
| Director | Oliver Stone |
| Genres | Drama |
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Born On The Fourth Of July
A drama based on the true story by Ron Kovic of a young soldier who returns from Vietnam paralysed.
| Starring | Tom Cruise, Willem Dafoe, Kyra Sedgwick, Raymond Barry, Jerry Levine, Frank Whaley, Byron Keith Minns |
|---|---|
| Director | Oliver Stone |
| Studio | UNIVERSAL PICTURES UK |
| Run time | DVD: 2 hrs 18 mins HD DVD: 2 hrs 18 mins |
| Certificate | |
| Collections | 100 Eighties Greats |
| Genres | Drama |
| Language | English |
| Dubbed | Czech, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish |
| Subtitles | Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish |
| Released | DVD: 09 May 2005 HD DVD: 29 Oct 2007 Production year: 1989 |
| Format | DVD |
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Critics' reviews (6)
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Director Oliver Stone continued his Vietnam trilogy with this biographical drama, a masterpiece of film-making that occupies a much broader canvas than its predecessor, Platoon. It stars Tom Cruise as Ron Kovic, the all-American boy who enlists in the marines because he loves his country. The Stars and Stripes flies proudly in his home town. Then he is hideously wounded, endures the rat-infested hell of a veterans' hospital and comes home to find the Stars and Stripes being burned in the streets. He drops out and goes to Mexico, then returns to America to conduct an antiwar campaign from his wheelchair. The story is based on the autobiography of Ron Kovic and Stone himself did two tours of duty in Vietnam; unsurprisingly, the movie fairly reeks of their experience and regret. Stone had won the director's Oscar for Platoon and he won it again for his work here. Sadly, Cruise had to settle for a nomination, but his transformation from golden boy to a ravaged and embittered paraplegic is utterly convincing.
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"...Cruise sets himself apart from the rest by proving with stunning ferocity that the most popular guy at the movies can also be a fine actor..."
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Most helpful member's review
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11 out of 12 people found this review helpful
Haunting and Disturbing
First, for those who think that Tom Cruise is just another pretty boy, this movie sets that mistaken view to rest. He is nothing short of dazzling in a role that is extremely demanding, physically, mentally, artistically, and emotionally. I don't see how anybody could play that role and still be the same person.
secondly, Stone's handling of the sex life of Vietnam Veterans in wheelchairs is entirely without sentimentality. There are no rose petals and no soft pedalling. There was no Jane Fonda, as in Coming Home, to play an angel of love. Instead the high school girl friend justifiably went her own way, and love became something you bought if you could afford it.
Thirdly, Stone's portrayal of America, and this movie in reality is about America, from the 1950s to the 1970s, from the simplicity of childhood war games and 4th of July parades down Main street USA to having your guts spill out in a foreign land and your comrades being sent home in body bags, was as ineffaceable as black ink on white paper. He takes us from pleased mothers and fathers and patriotic homilies to the discreditable disregard in our Veteran's hospitals to the bloody clashes between anti-war demonstrators and the police outside convention halls where revelling conventioneers wave flags and mouth spurious slogans.
I have seen most of Stone's work and as far as faithfulness to genuine detail and continuous attentiveness, this is his best. There are a thousand facts that Stone got exactly right, from Dalton Trumbo's paperback novel of a paraplegic from WW I, Johnny Got His Gun, that sat on a tray near Kovic's hospital bed, to the black medic telling him that there was a more important war going on at the same time as the Vietnam war, namely the civil rights movement, to a mother throwing her son out of the house when he no longer fulfilled her trophy case vision of what her son ought to be, to Willem Dafoe?s remark about what you have to do sexually when nothing in the middle moves.
Also striking were some of the scenes. The confession scene at the home of the boy Kovic accidentally shot; the Mexican brothel scene of sex/love desperation, the drunken scene at the pool hall bar and the pretty girl's face he touches, and then the drunken, hate-filled rage against his mother, and of course the savage hospital scenes, these and some others were deeply moving.
Yes, predictably, Oliver Stone's political message weighed heavily upon his artistic purpose. Straight-laced conservatives will find his portrait of America one-sided and offensive and something they'd rather forget. But I imagine that the guys, who fought in Vietnam and managed to get back somehow and see this movie, will find it redeeming. Certainly to watch Ron Kovic, just an ordinary Joe who believed in his country and the sentiments of John Wayne movies and comic book heroics, go from a depressed, enraged, drug-addled waste of a human being to an enlightened, focused, articulate, and ultimately triumphant spokesman for the anti-war movement, for veterans, and the disabled was wonderful to see. As Stone reminds us, Kovic really did become the hero that his misguided mother dreamed he would be.
No previous Vietnam War movie haunts me like this one. There is something about coming back less than whole that is worse than not coming back at all that eats away at our perception. And yet in the end there is here displayed the triumph of the human will and a story about how a man might find redemption in the most appalling of situations. -
Most recent members' review
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4 out of 4 people found this review helpful
TOP MOVIE !!!
Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July is not an adaptation of the memoir by Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, though that’s what the credits indicate. It’s an indulgent style showcase for Stone, who, with his longtime cinematographer Robert Richardson, employs every act of film trickery imaginable that doesn’t involve CGI effects.
Tom Cruise, in a role that was a brave departure for him in 1989, plays Kovic in his adult years. Kovic grows up as a child of the American dream in 1950s Long Island. He’s a God-fearing, baseball-hitting, patriotic lad who lives in an environment full of parades and malt shops. As a high school senior, young Ron doesn’t think twice about signing up for the Marines, believing that he’s doing the right thing for his country.
He does two tours of duty in Vietnam, a time that changes everything. He mistakenly guns down a Vietnamese family; then, minutes later, he accidentally kills a fellow soldier, so Kovic’s mental torment is already hefty when he gets shot in battle, leaving him paralyzed.
After a lengthy stay at an understaffed and filthy VA hospital, Kovic returns home to find the environment has changed. Where’s the red scare everyone was talking about? What happened to the American dream that he pursued? “I don’t feel like myself anymore,” he tells a childhood friend. Kovic starts drinking, rejects God and his family, and wastes time whoring and boozing with other vets in Mexico, where he officially hits rock bottom before making amends with his recent past.
Kovic’s story should be riveting on its own — a young man who realizes a little too late that his whole life has been a sham. Stone, who co-wrote the movie with Kovic, is not content to let Kovic’s life speak for itself. Born on the Fourth of July is a mish-mash of extreme close-ups, slow motion photography, and heavy-handed imagery and sound effects. The result: Kovic’s story gets muffled in all of the gee-whiz technique, zapping any emotion and personal touch from the material. It’s tough to distinguish the subject from Stone’s attempt to wow us with bleached out shots and sound symbolism. John Williams’ saccharine score serves only to turn Kovic into more of a stylistic conduit.
What’s so frustrating is that there are opportunities to show Kovic’s metamorphosis. One is when he takes a trip to visit an old flame (Kyra Sedgwick), now an anti-war protester. The other is the trip to Mexico. Both subplots are important because they open Kovic’s eyes to the failures in his life, but the most effecting parts of those scenes don’t involve any internal reflection. In Syracuse, it’s a student protest that goes violently awry; in Mexico, it’s Cruise and Willem Dafoe spitting at each other in the middle of a desert.
I’ll give Stone credit for capturing the craziness of Kovic’s life, but he fails to give a human face to his free fall. Stone, who (incredibly) won a Best Director Oscar, gives a cinematic face to it. You never feel that Kovic is the subject of his own movie. He’s indeed an outsider, but in the worst way. -
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Born On The Fourth Of July - HD DVD Version
Oliver Stone returned to the subject of Vietnam with this wrenching true account of the experiences of Ron Kovic, played by Tom Cruise. A patriotic kid from a small town, he volunteers eagerly to serve in Vietnam. After being disillusioned by the duplicity of military bureaucracy, he's paralyzed ...
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Born On The Fourth Of July
A drama based on the true story by Ron Kovic of a young soldier who returns from Vietnam paralysed....
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