A Few Good Men is the first film written by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who also penned the screenplay for the Broadway play and later for Oscar-nominated films such as Moneyball and The Social Network. The latter films are two I'd consider to be some of the strongest dramas of recent years, while A Few Good Men I'd consider to be one of the more overrated. This is a film that proves that if something easily-digestible, spelled out enough for the audience, given a reasonable amount of believability and unbelievability, and have some A-list stars at its core, that it can make American audiences mistake an adequate movie for a great movie.
With the high-praise the film has garnered, it would seem that Americans want recognizable faces, long-winded dialogs that come off as rants, unrealistic behavior in a mature setting, and redundancy in their court films rather than a film that relies on plausible characters and wasn't so reliant on trying to get their actors to spew out the next monologue that feels as if it should be concluded by a deafening applause.
The story concerns the death of a marine at the Guantanamo Naval Air Station on account of a hazing incident. Two Marines are in custody and Lieutenant Commander JoAnne Galloway (Demi Moore) is assigned to the case, along with the lazy, back-talking Navy Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise), who just happens to have a polished record of settling court cases. Lieutenant Kaffee is certain they could settle this dispute out of court, with the additional help of Lieutenant Sam Weinberg (Kevin Pollak), until they discover that the hazing incident may've been ordered by the strict and self-assured Colonel Nathan R. Jessup (Jack Nicholson). The film details the proceedings on the side of the defendant as well as the lengthy trial, where Lieutenant Commander Galloway and Lieutenant Kaffee go up against Kevin Bacon's Jack Ross, a Captain in the Marines.
The scenes that concern planning the trial and formulating arguments range from intriguing to monotonous, depending on Sorkin's focus at the time. When the three Marines look to analyze their arguments and hunt for witnesses make up the film's strongest hour, combined with the energy provided by the cast. When Lieutenant Kaffee throws a fit because Galloway and Weinberg are going in a different direction from him is when the film stalls and goes nowhere. Don't get me started on the drunken fit of rage he has towards the end, which is nothing but a tacked-on obligation in storytelling. I can't believe I'll ever say such a thing about Sorkin's writing style, which is usually subtle and very conversational.
Unsurprisingly, the most intense work comes during the court scenes, but they themselves have an odd staged feeling to them. Simply put, the characters don't seem to talk like real people in court, but rather people putting on a show for the courts and an audience, as if the trial is being televised. It's also safe to say that Kaffee's behavior is not only something that becomes grating on a particular viewer, as it does the characters in the film, but it is also one of the more unrealistic elements of the movie. I'm not wholly knowledgeable on the military, but I have enough to make the inference that a Lieutenant Commander would likely not tolerate the verbal cockiness and disrespect provided by that of a lower Lieutenant. Especially a female Lieutenant Commander, who likely had to prove herself to be granted such a position.
It's that and the utter nonsense the film puts us through, such as the film's conclusion, which makes no mistake at a flag-waving moral that attempts to make us shed a tear. What comes before this, on the contrary, is a very solid speech by Nicholson that has some truth and honesty to it (was I not supposed to side with him in the long run?) By the end of the film, I found myself liking Colonel Jessup a bit more than our protagonist Kaffee. Unlike Kaffee, who talks in the condescending way that he knows everything, Jessup could pass for knowing everything, being older, being more experienced, and more intelligent in the long run. I'm not saying Cruise does a poor job at portraying Kaffee, it's just his character is made a grating, unrealistic Marine stereotype instead of a person we can find appealing outside his shell of arrogance.
A Few Good Men does have one subversive quality and that is it's able to refuse adding a relationship subplot between Lieutenant Commander Galloway and Lieutenant Kaffee, unheard of for a film as mainstream-Hollywood as this. At the beginning of the film, based on what I thought was downplayed mutual attraction between Kaffee and Galloway, I was fully expecting a relationship to brew between the two, but one never brews. This is a delightfully mature element for Sorkin, who provides just a taste at what he'd do later in his career. He would later become more skilled at handling numerous characters, events, subplots, and small instances that take place over a long period of time. In A Few Good Men, he feels like he's doing ample work on a project for screen writing. The more I watched the film, the more I wished for a documentary on how military men and women are able to twirl their weapons and perform drills, marches, and stances with incredible precision, which is what the film opens with.
Starring: Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, Kevin Pollak, Jack Nicholson, Kiefer Sutherland, and Kevin Bacon. Directed by: Rob Reiner.
With the high-praise the film has garnered, it would seem that Americans want recognizable faces, long-winded dialogs that come off as rants, unrealistic behavior in a mature setting, and redundancy in their court films rather than a film that relies on plausible characters and wasn't so reliant on trying to get their actors to spew out the next monologue that feels as if it should be concluded by a deafening applause.
The story concerns the death of a marine at the Guantanamo Naval Air Station on account of a hazing incident. Two Marines are in custody and Lieutenant Commander JoAnne Galloway (Demi Moore) is assigned to the case, along with the lazy, back-talking Navy Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise), who just happens to have a polished record of settling court cases. Lieutenant Kaffee is certain they could settle this dispute out of court, with the additional help of Lieutenant Sam Weinberg (Kevin Pollak), until they discover that the hazing incident may've been ordered by the strict and self-assured Colonel Nathan R. Jessup (Jack Nicholson). The film details the proceedings on the side of the defendant as well as the lengthy trial, where Lieutenant Commander Galloway and Lieutenant Kaffee go up against Kevin Bacon's Jack Ross, a Captain in the Marines.
The scenes that concern planning the trial and formulating arguments range from intriguing to monotonous, depending on Sorkin's focus at the time. When the three Marines look to analyze their arguments and hunt for witnesses make up the film's strongest hour, combined with the energy provided by the cast. When Lieutenant Kaffee throws a fit because Galloway and Weinberg are going in a different direction from him is when the film stalls and goes nowhere. Don't get me started on the drunken fit of rage he has towards the end, which is nothing but a tacked-on obligation in storytelling. I can't believe I'll ever say such a thing about Sorkin's writing style, which is usually subtle and very conversational.
Unsurprisingly, the most intense work comes during the court scenes, but they themselves have an odd staged feeling to them. Simply put, the characters don't seem to talk like real people in court, but rather people putting on a show for the courts and an audience, as if the trial is being televised. It's also safe to say that Kaffee's behavior is not only something that becomes grating on a particular viewer, as it does the characters in the film, but it is also one of the more unrealistic elements of the movie. I'm not wholly knowledgeable on the military, but I have enough to make the inference that a Lieutenant Commander would likely not tolerate the verbal cockiness and disrespect provided by that of a lower Lieutenant. Especially a female Lieutenant Commander, who likely had to prove herself to be granted such a position.
It's that and the utter nonsense the film puts us through, such as the film's conclusion, which makes no mistake at a flag-waving moral that attempts to make us shed a tear. What comes before this, on the contrary, is a very solid speech by Nicholson that has some truth and honesty to it (was I not supposed to side with him in the long run?) By the end of the film, I found myself liking Colonel Jessup a bit more than our protagonist Kaffee. Unlike Kaffee, who talks in the condescending way that he knows everything, Jessup could pass for knowing everything, being older, being more experienced, and more intelligent in the long run. I'm not saying Cruise does a poor job at portraying Kaffee, it's just his character is made a grating, unrealistic Marine stereotype instead of a person we can find appealing outside his shell of arrogance.
A Few Good Men does have one subversive quality and that is it's able to refuse adding a relationship subplot between Lieutenant Commander Galloway and Lieutenant Kaffee, unheard of for a film as mainstream-Hollywood as this. At the beginning of the film, based on what I thought was downplayed mutual attraction between Kaffee and Galloway, I was fully expecting a relationship to brew between the two, but one never brews. This is a delightfully mature element for Sorkin, who provides just a taste at what he'd do later in his career. He would later become more skilled at handling numerous characters, events, subplots, and small instances that take place over a long period of time. In A Few Good Men, he feels like he's doing ample work on a project for screen writing. The more I watched the film, the more I wished for a documentary on how military men and women are able to twirl their weapons and perform drills, marches, and stances with incredible precision, which is what the film opens with.
Starring: Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, Kevin Pollak, Jack Nicholson, Kiefer Sutherland, and Kevin Bacon. Directed by: Rob Reiner.