Borstal Boy; We Were Soldiers

After violence and sex, Hollywood's best sales tactic is the questionable label "Based on a true story." Suckers fall for that one every time?it's what makes people take A Beautiful Mind seriously while disdaining I Am Sam (even though Sean Penn in the latter gives a much more interesting, honest, creative performance than Russell Crowe's cutie-pie schizo in the former). And Ridley Scott brazens crude action-movie gimmicks in Black Hawk Down by pretending factual representation. It'd be better, indeed more challenging, for filmmakers to give up the entire "truth" sham and force moviegoers to develop some imaginative capacities. This way people could realize when most movies are not based on plausibility, facts or good sense and then, maybe, understand their willingness to swallow lies. They'd stop accepting professional prevaricators' distorted human experience as their own fantasy and then, perhaps, learn to reach toward worldly complexity. In short: they'd be ready for the trenchant Borstal Boy.

As an account of the Irish playwright Brendan Behan's teenage years spent in a British boys' prison-school (a borstal) during the 1940s, Borstal Boy isn't factually detailed enough to pass for biography. But I don't think director Peter Sheridan or the film's American distribution company, Strand Releasing (which frequently deals with specialized subjects), are dishonest about the film's essence. No mere biography would be this ambiguous or metaphysical. Borstal Boy most accurately can be described as "Based on themes from Behan's life and poetry." Besides, it's a fallacy that people ever went to biopics to learn who the central personage was; and the most one got from movies like The Life of Emile Zola or Lust for Life (Van Gogh) or Serpico or My Left Foot (Christy Brown) were reenactments of some famous event or legendary personal struggle. The makers of Borstal Boy presume that Behan's emotional formation is interesting enough. They concentrate on the development of Behan's romantic consciousness. Effete? Maybe. But this approach avoids being tritely "movieish" like A Beautiful Mind by looking directly at Behan's sexual ambiguity.

Because Behan's teenage sexuality is not so clear cut as Julian Schnabel's celebration of Reinaldo Arenas' open gayness in Before Night Falls, this achievement is more precarious. Behan's stature as a rambunctious Irish literary figure (a self-described "drinker with a writing problem") complements the legend of his youthful involvement with the Irish Republican Army?his zealotry for revolution got him incarcerated several times. This profile is easier to heroize than the recognition and empathy with homosexuality that Behan wrote about in his own books and plays. Director Sheridan (cowriting with Nye Heron) honors Behan's honesty by the ingenuous presentation of queerness. Comprising images of isolation and reformatory repression (representing the kind of tension that has kept many a nationalist in the closet), the film's subtly eroticized atmosphere?boys in Beau Travail-style coordinated colors (blue knit sweaters, tan shirts with floppy collars, short khaki pants)?almost makes it a youthful idyll. Ah, rugby! Though not nearly as complex as the sensual male rituals Nagisa Oshima observed among the samurai in Gohatto or as schematic as Leontine Sagan's classic 1931 venture into girls-school lesbianism Maedchen in Uniform, Borstal Boy conveys a comparably serious leaning.

From the start, American actor Shawn Hatosy shows how young Brendan's political rebellion is entwined with his radical sexual stirrings. Seeing him tape dynamite sticks to his inner thighs is a moment Jean Genet might have envied for its combined erotic-political suggestiveness. Brendan travels to Liverpool but being both brash and coy, he buys a girlie magazine with hesitant urgency. Still a naive, unformed radical, young Brendan's conflicting idealism and shame (when impassioned he speaks with a stammer) make him cling to culturally accepted heterosexuality?especially when Liz (Eva Birthistle), the daughter of the borstal's warden (Michael York), introduces him to art. Brendan's political background and the Irish troubles are only alluded to, it's the circumstance of oppression that inspire Sheridan and Heron. Every barracks clash and foiled escape attempt shows the hazardous effort to rise above repression?to realize one's nature as well as one's citizenship. Such dual identity is particularly germane for artists, it justifies the filmmakers' expressionist view of Behan's mind.

A Beautiful Mind's relationships were fatuous, but the excision of John Nash's homosexual exploits (what The Blade calls "de-gaying") was the least of its offenses. The problem started with the specious assumption that audiences need a "Based on a true story" crutch to be interested in complex material. (If Howard really believed that, he wouldn't have tacked on a happy ending.) Borstal Boy asks intelligent viewers to watch it as a fever dream of oppression, not realism. Sheridan and Heron get their stylistic boldness from equating Behan's struggle with Oscar Wilde's, an earlier Anglo-Irish, imprisoned literary radical. ("Ballad of Reading Gaol?you should read it," Liz tells Brendan.) Liz's borstal production of The Importance of Being Earnest emphasizes the play's artifice, offering it as a liberating text?a presumption intrinsic to the film's concept of literary heroism. This vision of heroism is centered on Brendan's homosexual awakening.

Admittedly, Borstal Boy has its boys-behind-bars cliches but its emotional (homosocial) subtext is vibrant?especially when Milwall (Danny Dyer), a young English sailor on detention, disrupts Brendan's ordeal with the first sign of affection. Dyer, a full-lipped, pouty, teddy bear of a lad, displays gentle intellection (reminiscent of Forest Whitaker). Actor enough to overcome the inevitable drag scene and humiliation scene, Dyer's bond with Hatosy comes from a stalwart, expanded idea of masculinity. A boy's boy, Milwall's also a jock who hangs on the boxing ring's ropes, swaying hips midair?a subtle provocation. No wonder Behan offers him the pendant of St. Brendan, patron saint of sailors, and Milwall takes up the gold chain sensuously. It's a small, bold gesture, confirming the filmmakers' commitment and a perfect example of a movie transcending biopic formula with emotional credibility. (None of the rabbity sex-bouts in Y Tu Mama Tambien have half the impact.) You might scoff at the climax where Milwall goes off to war and he and Brendan?English sailor/Irish rebel?salute past politics. But at least the filmmakers challenge your skepticism with profound sentiment. "I had to come here to learn what love is," Brendan says of the borstal. "I had it both ways?just like Oscar Wilde." It's the film's attention to youthful ardor that powers such a line; it's an object lesson in the usefulness of literary and screen versions of history. Though not a work of art like Gohatto, Beau Travail or Maedchen in Uniform, Borstal Boy feels near-poetic.

We Were Soldiers Directed by Randall Wallace If The Patriot proved Mel Gibson had no grasp of American history (but might in fact detest it), We Were Soldiers proves that, like Braveheart, he counters with an effective sense of fantasy. Impersonating Southern Lt. Col. Hal Moore, Gibson and director Randall Wallace restage the first American battle in Vietnam?not with the rigor of something "based on real events" but with imaginative clarity. After the incoherent bombast of Black Hawk Down, cinematographer Dean Semler's majestic widescreen staging is, occasionally, awesome. After all the post-Saving Private Ryan ripoffs, this looks like the best Vietnam movie yet. The depressing fact of American military futility gets confused with heroizing Custer's Last Stand (!) yet it's also offered as instruction on what not to do next time. That means the routine scenes of infantry valor and old-vet doggedness (Gibson's Popeye forearms and Sam Elliott's Bluto voice) give old-fashioned satisfaction?even while seeming 100 percent fake.

What's unforgivable is the attempt at social context, the domestic scenes of Gibson's wife (Madeline Stowe) and other clueless military wives. The low point comes when Stowe delivers a fateful telegram to the lone black widow (Simbi Khali Williams). Anyone who doesn't laugh at the cliche Negro inarticulateness probably also believed Gibson's Patriot contention that there was never slavery in America.