Retro Reel by Sreepathy, Volume 24: A Few Good Men

Editor's note: this is an archived 2014 column; references to availability are from that time.

Retro Reel is a column about movies — not the latest box-office releases, but good movies of different genres, recommended with the sense of a retrospective. Sreepathy is an unabashed movie buff who loves a well-told onscreen story; he has a list of about 450 must-watch movies, and Retro Reel shares some of his best movie-watching experiences. He lives in Naperville with his wife and two sons.

A Few Good Men

"You can't handle the truth!"

There are actors who desperately seek your notice. And then there are the very few whom you cannot help but notice — even if they are as still as the furniture in a scene. Perhaps that's what they call screen presence. Jack Nicholson is one such actor. So in A Few Good Men (1992), when he thunders those words in an open courtroom, you not only take notice but are brainwashed into thinking there's no significant character in the movie other than his. Yet of the five main characters, his has the least screen-time. So powerful is his presence and so convincing is his performance that by the time he finishes his rant in court, you seem almost ready to buy what he is hawking — a moral imperative with a dangerous logic that demands support for the brutal undemocratic methods of the few to protect the democratic freedoms of the many.

You see, the problem with virtue is that it is monochromatic. But villainy, particularly of the intelligent variety, has several interesting hues. While it's always wonderful to deal with the virtuous, they are easily predictable and satiate your curiosity quickly. Watching the villainous holds a kind of diabolical fascination that does not jade easily, simply because you're forever trying to read their minds about what they'll do next. Give me a virtuous hero and I'll watch a movie once. But give me a villain who is articulate and has presence, and I'll watch it many times over. But the charismatic presence of people with twisted ideas — not just actors in movies, but those in social and public circles — should make you pause, shudder, and ponder about the effect they can have on you with their searing passion and their power over the spoken word.

Jack Nicholson plays the highly-decorated Col. Jessup, whose star is on the rise in the Army's ranks and who commands one of its units in Guantanamo Bay along the Cuban border. A Few Good Men opens with two marines under his command being charged with an attack on a third that results in his death. It seems like an open-and-shut case — except that at its heart is 'Code Red,' an unauthorized system of disciplinary action meted out by unit members to others who break its honor code of "Unit, Corps, God, Country." The honor code is like religion — it has a vice-like grip on its members, either because they completely believe in it or because they dare not question it. As noble, honorable, and fear-inspiring as that code is, it inevitably comes into conflict with other equally noble human values. The military-justice process kicks in, and the marines are assigned a three-person legal team.

The team is overseen by Cdr. Galloway (Demi Moore), a woman military lawyer, and led by the softball-bat-wielding, brash, young, rookie counsel, Lt. Kaffee (Tom Cruise), assisted by Lt. Weinberg. Though Kaffee has less than a year's experience, he has a clean record of never losing any of his forty-four cases — because he has never seen the inside of a courtroom, having mastered the art of plea-bargaining everything out of court with what Galloway describes as his "fast-food-slick-ass-Persian-bazaar" manner. From their preliminary investigation, the team is convinced there's more to the tragic case of Pvt. Santiago's death at the hands of Cpl. Dawson and Pvt. Downey than meets the eye: the two accused marines were only carrying out orders. From here on, the narrative is all about scrupulously tracking back to why Santiago was attacked by his own unit members, what caused his death, who was involved, and how far the involvement went up the chain of command.

A Few Good Men is the screen adaptation by Aaron Sorkin of his own stage play, which was partially inspired by a true U.S. Army incident — though the movie makes no such claim in its credits. Make no mistake about its category: it is formulaic Hollywood box-office stuff. There are no surprises in the way the movie transpires toward its expected epilogue; you don't get any points for guessing, rightly, who is good, who is bad, and who is in between. What sets the movie brilliantly apart can be summed up in one word: crisp. From its precisely-pressed military uniforms to its spit-and-polish sets, its sparkling screenplay, its smoothly extracted acting performances, and its consummately handled courtroom scenes — the production values are crisp all the way. Director Rob Reiner is among those rare thinking mainstream directors who know how to soup up an entertainment movie by giving it the look and feel of genuine authenticity. If you've seen The American President, which had the same writer-director duo of Sorkin and Reiner, you'll know what I mean. Though A Few Good Men is a commercial outing with a big-budget star cast, it never loses its laser-like focus on the court case — not even to make a concession for a romantic sub-plot between the very attractive pair of Tom Cruise and Demi Moore.

Reiner makes the movie highly watchable thanks to two big resources. First, the extraordinarily high level of acting: Nicholson's presence raises the bar so high that even the minor character of Cpl. Dawson gets a telling performance from Wolfgang Bodison, an otherwise unknown actor. Second, Aaron Sorkin's screenplay and dialogue writing, which crackles with energy, attitude, and adrenaline. Reiner paces the narrative to perfection, especially in the endgame, where he uses pauses, silences, and sotto voce dialogues before finally exploding with the high-voltage courtroom confrontation between Nicholson and Cruise. As towering as Nicholson's performance is, watch Tom Cruise — despite his chocolaty, schoolboyish looks — get the better of Nicholson, if only slightly, in the dénouement, where he literally puts him in his place as a schoolteacher would an errant pupil.

PS: Rated R (language). Available in the Naperville Public Library.