Hamburger Hill

The Vietnam conflict became a popular topic for Hollywood films in the mid to late 1980s.  A few earlier films like COMING HOME and GO TELL THE SPARTANS thoughtfully embraced the unpopular war but it wasn't until director Oliver Stone brought his own foxhole experiences to PLATOON in 1986 that audiences truly had their psyches jolted with sober battlefield realism.  The following year, writer/producer James Carabatsos offered his terrible recollections of the exceedingly bloody ten day effort by the U.S. Army to take the Ap Bia Mountain from the Vietnamese.  The film was called HAMBURGER HILL, its name derived from the grisly fates that awaited many of the 187th Regiment.

Director James Irvin, who shot some documentaries in Vietnam in the late 1960s, oversees this doggedly realistic and reverent drama, a film that relentlessly trudges through mud and blood up that incline with the "Screaming Eagles" of the 101st Airborne Division as they fight the enemy before them and their own resentment towards each other and those back home who seem to have stopped caring or are just plain bitter. HAMBURGER HILL is one potent scene after another, more a series of vignettes at first as the grunts learn how to properly brush their teeth and escape certain ambush (via a demonstration by a Viet Cong deserter).  As mortars rain down and newbie privates get slaughtered before they know what happened, squad leader Sgt. Frantz (Dylan McDermott) tries to maintain morale but is often just as visible in his grief.

The film sketches the group of recruits and their superiors with just enough detail (mainly through their dialogue) for viewers to connect with them sufficiently as to feel something when they perish.  Only a handful make it to the top of the Hill.  On the way are pelting rains and endless firefights.  U.S. air support that turns friendly fire into American casualties. Riflemen who listen to audio tapes made by a girlfriend stateside; another reads in disbelief a letter from his beloved that he learns will be the last, as her college friends told her it was immoral to be involved with a soldier.  Another who is on his second tour of duty, relaying a painful story of a ruined marriage and hostility meted out by ungrateful Americans.

HAMBURGER HILL rarely steps wrong, aside from a few cliched scenes (moments in a whore house, a confrontation with a news crew) and feels utterly authentic.  It is not an audacious cabaret ala APOCALYPSE NOW or FULL METAL JACKET (which turned that camera crew cliche on its ear, by the way), but rather a more earnest recount that resembles that old G.I. Diary series from the '70s.  But like those more distinguished feature films, it achieves its own unique blood and tear stained poetry.