It has become
one of the most iconic exchanges in movie history, the confrontation between
Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson at the climax of A Few Good Men. Tom
Cruise shouts: “I want the truth!” and Nicholson responds: “You can’t handle
the truth!”
I don’t know how many times I watched this
exchange and the entire film over the past thirty years before I learned that
the man who had written it was none other than Aaron Sorkin.
I can imagine the most devout West Wing and
Social Network fans saying that Sorkin would never write a movie like
this, it is far too conventional and features very few of the dynamics we associate
with the inventor of walk-and-talk. You might be further shocked to learn that
not only was this Sorkin’s first screenplay, he adapted it from a stage play
that he had written the previous year. They
might be less surprised to learn that Sorkin based the play on a real-life incident:
a lance corporal at Guantanamo bay along with nine other enlisted men tied up a
fellow marine and severely beat him for ‘snitching’ to the NCIS. That corporal was acquitted and was later honorably
discharged. You can see how this could
have inspired the mind of a then thirty-year old playwright.
What might be
of greater interest to those of us who consider the film a modern classic is
that A Few Good Men was not, when it came out in the fall of 1992,
particularly well regarded by critics. Part of it may have been due to the fact
that it was a box office hit (as I’ve written critics do not believe commerce
has anything to do with a critical value) Another problem might have been that
while A Few Good Man was a great film, it had come on the heels of so many
movies that were out and out masterpieces.
By the time
of A Few Good Men’s release in December of 1992, there had been a fair
share of truly magnificent films released. Howards End had come out in
the spring; the world had been greeted by the start of the late career
renaissance of two of the greatest directors in history: Robert Altman’s The
Player and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. Spike Lee’s Malcolm X was
revered by many (Roger Ebert named it the best movie of the year) and The
Crying Game had put Miramax, for better or worse, on the map. By
comparison, A Few Good Men with its superstar cast looked like the
definition of Oscar bait.
Ironically, other
circumstances prevented A Few Good Men from taking advantage of that
label. The film was nominated for five Golden Globes, including Best Picture,
Best Director for Rob Reiner and Aaron Sorkin’s very first Golden Globe
nomination. But Scent of a Woman ended
up being the big winner of that year and within a week of the awards, it became
common knowledge that the HFPA had engaged in bribery charges for the film to
win all three of its awards – including Best Screenplay. The film went home
empty handed.
Worse was to
come on the day of the nominations. A Few Good Men was nominated for
Best Picture, but the film was not nominated for Best Director or Best
Screenplay. At the time, there was more outrage when it came to the fact that
Rob Reiner had been the only director of a nominated film who had not received
a corresponding nomination. The fact that A Few Good Men was nominated
for neither award guaranteed it had no chance on Oscar night and though it
received four nomination, it didn’t win any of them.
If I am being
honest, it’s hard to argue that the Oscars made huge mistakes with its winners in
1993: Unforgiven by far deserved all of the Oscars it ended up getting, even
Gene Hackman’s triumph over Jack Nicholson for Best Supporting Actor. And even if the film had received a corresponding
nomination, in comparison with both Unforgiven and Howard’s End, it’s
not in the same league. The bigger problem was that the film’s nomination for
Best Picture irritated a lot of critics at the time, particularly those who
believed, not unjustifiably that Malcolm X deserved a nomination more
than A Few Good Men did. Based on what
we have come to know of the Oscars during that era, it was hard not to argue
about the institutional racism that omitted Malcolm X from consideration.
Furthermore, there was a bizarre pattern
to how the nominations played out. The Player, Columbia pictures other major
critical release was the victim of an obverse reaction: the movie received Best
Director and Best Screenplay nominations but was not nominated for Best
Picture. (The Player had, for the record, won the Golden Globe for Best
Comedy/Musical that year and Tim Robbins had won Best Actor in that category. He
was shut out of the Best Actor nods along with Tom Cruise.)
What is hard to
deny is that A Few Good Men clearly had a hold on the general public:
the film would win the Peoples Choice Award and the MTV Movie Award for Best
Picture (the latter was in its first year) And while the movie may be a bit
conventional for Sorkin, it is still a rousing entertainment.
In hindsight what
is remarkable about the movie is how good it is considering that Sorkin has
very little skill when it comes to writing about the legal process. I speak mainly when it comes to his work in
television: even the most loyal West Wing fans can find little merit in
the storylines that deal with Sorkin’s concealing his MS and the subsequent
fall-out from the killing of a Muslim general. The lawyers might be
entertaining; the law isn’t. And while
no one considers The Newsroom a masterpiece, the fact that the second and
third scenes made the center of their stories about lawsuits and the courtroom
did the show no favors. (The fact that
between those two series Sorkin had written The Social Network, a movie
that ostensibly centers on a series of depositions and didn’t seem to have
learned anything in the latter film is baffling to me.)
Perhaps the reason
the conflict in the film works is because the subject is military law, not criminal
or corporate. It also helps matters that Sorkin lays out a conundrum at the
start of the film that was, by the standards of 1990s movies and certainly
courtroom dramas, basically unheard of.
The defendants Privates Downey and Lance Corporal Dawson do not deny
that they are responsible for the death of William Santiago. Their contention
is that they were acting under orders of their commanding officers. Initially Lt. Kaffee (Cruise), while he has a
brilliant legal mind has never set foot in a courtroom and is determined to
plea this out. He might very well have
done so without the involvement of Commander JoAnne Galloway.
Because so much of
the movie is focused on Kaffee, it’s forgotten that Galloway is essentially the
driving force of the movie. For obvious reasons fans of the movie remember the
performance of Cruise and Jack Nicholson; left out of it is just how good Demi Moore
is. There are no other major female leads
in the film, no doubt by design: as Jessup says cynically in an early scene, the
military is very much a boy’s club and Galloway is barely given any respect in
the first half of the film. When he flies down to Guantanamo to look at the
crime scene, Kaffee barely pressed the military brass and when Galloway begins
to question Jessup, he shuts her down three separate times before Galloway
brings up the Code Red.
The film never
even considers a romantic subplot for the film, which I can imagine the studios
were now doubt pushing for throughout the pitch process and all the way through
the shooting. This was a wise decision: Galloway has no doubt spent her career
being accused of sleeping her way to the top and she has no intention of
compromising herself in this way. Kaffee never considers her romantically
either, but it’s worth noting for most of the film he holds with a certain
amount of professional contempt. Part of this is due to his own laziness but it
is also due to Galloway’s relentless idealism. She is convinced that because their
clients were just following the chain of command, that means that they can be
found innocent. She keeps trying to convince Kaffee of this, asking if he
believes it. In what may be one of the first examples of Sorkin’s dialogue onscreen,
Kaffee shouts: “It doesn’t matter what I believe. It only matters what I
can prove!” It’s also worth noting that Galloway’s behavior is reckless
at times: halfway through the film, she sees that Downey is going to be shaky
on the stand but does not brief Kaffee before he puts him up there. This leads
to a disastrous cross-examination that almost certainly would have put his
clients in the stockade. Kaffee gets
drunk and berates Galloway that night (there’s another reason which I will not
reveal) because her behavior might very well lead to him getting prison time
himself.
Kaffee spends the
lion’s share of the case fundamentally angry, not just as Galloway but his
clients. Before the trial begins, he manages to get a plea bargain where they
will receive two years and be home in six months. Dawson refuses to accept this deal because it
would mean being dishonorably discharged and to him that is a worse punishment
than life in a military prison. Kaffee’s justifiable frustration with his
clients makes him want to be removes as counsel. It is not until he realizes
why someone with as limited experience in the courtroom as him would be given
this case in the first person that he realizes that there is a coverup and he
decides to pursue the case.
At this point A
Few Good Men is associated so much with Jack Nicholson, it might surprise
those who have not seen the film recently that his character of Col. Jessup’s
role is not that large: aside from the confrontation, we only see him at the
start of the film. But few would argue that it is not one of the triumph’s in
Nicholson’s long and storied career. The scene takes place over twenty minutes and
most of it Kaffee trying to lure Jessup out into making a mistake. There is a
moment in the middle when he thinks he has him – but Jessup surprises him by
behaving coolly and calmly. Kaffee is so stunned by this he freezes and Jessup actually
leaves the stand. Kaffee then pauses and tells him he isn’t finished. Even then
it takes quite a few minutes for Kaffee to get there again and it is in that
moment Jessup shows the other contempt he hold for not only counsel but the
entire process.
Nicholson’s
nomination started what would be a brilliant career revival for him that featured
some of his greatest roles. He won his third Oscar for his extraordinary
performance in As Good as It Gets, gave one of his greatest performances in the
undervalued About Schmidt and dominated the screen in his role as the
mob boss in The Departed. In between would be some undervalued gems that
have not gotten as much publicity: two movies that he made with Sean Penn as
his director: The Crossing Guard and The Pledge, the latter of
which Roger Ebert considered one of the greatest films ever made. He would also
reunite with Bob Rafelson, the director who had launched his career to the stratosphere
in Five Easy Pieces in the undervalued masterwork Blood and
Wine. So much of Nicholson has been
considered caricature we frequently forget how magnificent an actor he was at
the height of his career.
Tom Cruise has
been the subject of so much controversy over the past twenty years, both in
regards to his relationships with Scientology and his sexual preferences that
we frequently forget that in the first half of his career, he could be a
brilliant performer. No doubt part of this came from having a master director
guiding him: his work as Ron Kovic in Oliver Stone’s Born on The Fourth of
July is an incredibly work because
in most of the film we almost don’t know its Tom Cruise in the lead. Jerry
Maguire is one of the great films of the 1990s and one of his highpoints as
a performer. Magnolia is a modern
classic and Cruise was in large part the reason it works as well it does. And in The Last Samurai he gives one
of the most balanced and strikingly dignified performances in an undervalued
masterpiece. By that point in his career, however, he had started to move more
into the action hero part of his career and while on occasion, such as the
masterpiece Collateral and his hysterical cameo in Tropic Thunder,
we see flashes of the talent he once was he is now so allied with Maverick and
Ethan Hunt that is unlikely we’ll ever see that caliber of work again.
The film also
features performances by several talents, some likely, some unlikely. Kevin
Bacon is superb as the representative of the JAG, perfectly capable of pick-up
games with Kaffee, but find tearing him to pieces in court. Kevin Pollak is
marvelous as Kaffee’s friend and co-council, his most loyal ally. Pollak is a
stand-up comedian, but when given the right material, as he was here and The
Usual Suspects he can stand with some of the best. The late J.T. Walsh has a small but critical
role as a man who knows what really happened the night of the Code Red but can
not deal with the system. And Kiefer Sutherland gives one of his best film performances
as Jessup’s most loyal soldier, a man whose voice withers with contempt for
everything that has happened. In
retrospect, his character is the most frightening because of his blind devotion
to the cause. At one point in his cross, his character says: “I believe in two things: the
lord Jesus Christ and Colonel Nathan Jessup.” It is that kind of thinking in our military that has led to so much failure
in foreign policy then – and now.
I realize I have
spent the lion’s share of this article talking about the trial but neither the
defendants nor the victim. That is because we never see Santiago and the
defendants are barely a presence in the film, even though the trial is about
them. I have a feeling this is by
design: Sorkin clearly sees all three men as victims of the same process, a chain
of command that demands loyalty to the brass but shows none to the rank and
file. The defense is challenging the system but not even at this point in
Sorkin’s career will he go so far as the call this as that this will change anything. The system
works the way it’s supposed to – today. Sorkin could not have foreseen the
horrors that have gone on in Guantanamo in order to defend these laws, but it is
worth noting that while the lance corporal was acquitted, three years after the
movie his body was found brutally beaten and ridden with bullets. His murder is
unsolved to this day. Perhaps that fate may well await Downey and Dawson down
the road.
Even if he’s not
remembered for A Few Good Men, Rob Reiner remembered Sorkin. Two years
after the absolute disaster North Reiner decided that the best follow-up
project for him was another Aaron Sorkin script. The two of them reunited for The
American President. The film would help propel Sorkin to Sports Night and
the rest was history. Perhaps A Few Good Men may not be the movie that
most people think of when they think of Aaron Sorkin. But I bet he has a place
in his heart for it even now.
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