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In the early stages, Platoon's I-was-there authenticity does nothing but call attention to itself. That big ugly swirl of a scar across Barnes' cheek, for example, inevitably provokes thoughts of an early-morning makeup call. Then two things happen: the actors stop attitudinizing and fall smartly into their roles, and the rivalry between Barnes and Elias begins to suppurate sensationally. Elias, a night-world Natty Bumppo, believes only in his skills and his men; he is both in Viet Nam and above it. Barnes can act as impromptu medic to save a soldier's life or, with equal vigor, kill a village woman in front of her husband. In him the grunts find everything worth admiring and hating about war. And even a man determined to kill the sergeant must wait for his approval before blasting him to perdition.
The same fiery ambiguities marked Salvador, which opened early this year and has found welcoming bunks in the rep houses and on videocassette. There the path to wisdom led not from innocence but from noncommittal hipness. James Woods, the movies' definitive Sidney Sleaze, plays a renegade war correspondent, a self-proclaimed weasel with an itchy social conscience. In El Salvador (and, climactically, back in the States), he learns firsthand of atrocity and duplicity in the name of law. Because the protagonist is knowing instead of naive, Salvador never slips into the haranguing righteousness of Platoon. If Salvador nonetheless seems a smaller film, this is because it is content to catalog the sins of power; they do not accumulate dramatically until the final twisting crisis. But it is a fine study of a wily man tiptoeing through fatal corruption. Just like Hollywood, Stone might say.
"You got to get close, Rich, to get the truth," a photographer tells the correspondent in Salvador. "You get too close, you die." Sometimes Stone gets and stays too close. Much of Platoon is strong meat, indifferently prepared. His script is over-wrought—fine, the material virtually demands excess and excrescence—but it is also overwritten, with too much narration that spells out what has already been so eloquently shown. As a director, Stone does not yet have the craft to match or mediate his passion. His film works in spurts: a scene that sputters with bombast will be followed by some wrenching fire storm of death in combat. But nowadays, when directors aim for the predictably cute or gross, these spurts are tonic. They prove that someone out there, working from the mind and gut, is willing to put both aggressively onscreen. So Platoon is different. It matters.