These thoughts lead me, naturally, to Peter Davis's masterwork, Hearts and Minds.

It is one of the great feats of filmmaking: a coolly comprehensive assessment of America's war against Vietnam, completed while the shots were still being fired. Since the film's first showing in 1974, and its subsequent receipt in 1975 of the Oscar for best documentary, an entire generation has grown up without being able to watch this picture on the screen. Parker and Stone belong to this generation, which never saw the realities of American power revealed in a movie house but was steeped in counterfantasies, which soon came flooding into theaters as if to wash away Davis's achievement: First Blood, Top Gun, Missing in Action and their innumerable knockoffs.

Some subjects, America does suppress.

Fortunately, the Film Archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has spent two years restoring Hearts and Minds, and Rialto Pictures is putting the new prints into national release, starting with a run at New York's Film Forum (through November 4). If you are of an older generation and lived through the years of the Vietnam War, you need to see this movie; only a picture this uncompromising can shake the dust off your memories and emotions. And if you are of a younger generation, you also need to see Hearts and Minds. It will shock you not only with the truths it brings to light but with the force of its truly balanced filmmaking.

Davis got all sides into the movie: American Presidents, generals and planners; Vietnamese leaders, prostitutes and peasants; French colonial officials; US veterans, from the heartbroken to the vehemently prowar; mourners; flag-wavers; coffin-makers; amputees; even a high school football team, whose coach helps set the tone for the movie by instructing his players to kill. By creating a counterpoint among these many voices, Davis composed a work that is simultaneously an exposé of the history of the war, an exploration of American martial culture and a deeply humane portrait of the victims.

In Hearts and Minds, Peter Davis managed to understand everything. Then, against convention, he forgave nothing.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.