Heaven And Earth Details

After Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, Oliver Stone turned his attention to the Vietnamese themselves, in particular a village girl called Le Ly (Hiep Thi Le). She endures the horrors of the war only to marry a psychotic American soldier (Tommy Lee Jones), who takes her to California. Unjustly slated by the critics, the picture shows Stone's brilliance in creating scenes of unusual vividness — it's horrifying, beautiful, ugly and moving all at the same time. It is also, at times, an unsettling black comedy about cultural and religious rituals that switches from Buddhist shrines in rice paddies to consumerist shrines in supermarkets. There hasn't been such a great politicised melodrama since the heyday of Otto Preminger.

An ambitious and epic film, but too strident to be successful and one that, although ostensibly dealing with the life of a Vietnamese woman, still manages to make the subject-matter that of the American experience in Vietnam and its aftermath; the balance