In "Born on the Fourth of July," his performance is so good that the movie lives through it. Stone is able to make his statement with Cruise's face and voice and doesn't need to put everything into the dialogue.
The movie begins in the early 1960s with footage of John F. Kennedy on the television exhorting, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Young Ron Kovic, star athlete and high school hero, was the kind of kid waiting to hear that message. And when the Marine recruiters came to visit his high school, he was ready to sign up. There was no doubt in his mind: There was a war in Vietnam, and his only worry was that he would miss the action.
He knew there was a danger of being wounded or killed, but, hell, he wanted to make a sacrifice for his country.
His is the kind of spirit all nations must have, from time to time. The problem with the Vietnam War is that it did not deserve it.
There was no way for a patriotic small-town kid to know that, however, and so we follow young Kovic from his last prom to the battlefield. In these scenes, Cruise still looks like Cruise - boyish, open-faced - and I found myself wondering if he would be able to make the transition into the horror that I knew was coming. He was.
Stone was in combat for a year. In "Platoon," he showed us firefights so confused that we (and the characters) often had little idea where the enemy was. In "Born on the Fourth of July," Stone directs a crucial battle scene with great clarity so that we can see how Kovic made a mistake. That mistake, which tortures him for years afterward, probably produced the loss of focus that led to his crippling injury.
The scenes that follow, in a military hospital, are merciless in their honesty. If you have even once, for a few hours perhaps, been helpless in a sickbed and unable to summon aid, all of your impotent rage will come flooding back as the movie shows a military care system that is hopelessly overburdened. At one point, Kovic screams out for a suction pump that will drain a wound that might cost him his leg. He will never have feeling in the leg, but, God damn it, he wants to keep it all the same. It's his. And a distracted doctor absent-mindedly explains about equipment shortages and "budget cutbacks" in care for the wounded vets.
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