If a movie shows a military funeral featuring the “missing-man formation”—that fighter-jet fly-by where one out of the four warplanes pulls vertical and disappears into the clouds—I’m a mess. If the movie ends with a scene in Arlington Cemetery, with its rows of white gravestones as far as the eye can see, accompanied by “Braveheart” type strains or militaristic bugles and drums, I’m immediately destroyed. “Courage Under Fire” has both.
Act of Valor
Army Capt. Karen Walden (Meg Ryan) is to be the first woman candidate to get the Medal of Honor, which will be bestowed posthumously for her courage under fire as a medevac pilot during Desert Storm.
Assigned to investigate her medal candidacy is one Lt. Col. Nathaniel Serling (Denzel Washington), who is himself wrapped in a dark, Gulf War controversy. The movie opens with the scene where all hell breaks loose and comes down on his head.
Serling, in the fog of nighttime tank warfare, gave the order to fire that killed several of his own men, including his best friend. That staggering weight, along with the further soul-burden of having been forced to lie about it all to the families of the dead, has left him with a deep depression compounded by a virulent drinking problem and an inability to be around his wife (Regina Taylor), and their children.
Nat now works a desk job under Gen. Hershberg (Michael Moriarty), who handpicked Nat to rubber-stamp Walden’s medal approval. Hershberg’s military brass superiors, Congress, and White House public relations weasel (Bronson Pinchot) are infatuated with the PR potential. Since they’ve got Nat over a barrel due to the coverup of his Gulf War fiasco, they expect him not to make a fuss about any controversy he might uncover during his inquiry into the demise of Capt. Walden, thus greasing the rails to a tidy PR medal-presentation package.
Not So Fast
When Serling separately interviews the surviving crew members, he uncovers anecdotal discrepancies regarding the night and following morning during which Walden and crew were pinned down by enemy fire.
The haunted heroin addict and former medic Alario (Matt Damon, in what was arguably the break-out role on his ascension to stardom) is a Karen Walden fan, whereas the openly hostile staff sergeant Monfriez (Lou Diamond Phillips) claims she was a coward—and here we see the main components of the Rashomon dichotomy.
However, while the “Rashomon’s’' intention was to illustrate the trickiness of truth, here the technique is utilized for purposes of generating suspense, because when we finally get to the bottom of it all, the facts are incontrovertible. These inconvenient truths naturally don’t sit well with Gen. Hershberg, which puts Nat’s career immediately in jeopardy. “Courage Under Fire” is therefore more a story about truthfulness per se: The corrosive effects of trying to deep-six the truth, and the cathartic effects of having the courage to hew to it, regardless of the perceived outcome.
And so Serling, no longer able to tolerate the cover-up of his own mistake (and also being hounded by fellow-soldier-turned-journalist Tony Gartner (Scott Glenn) to deliver an honorable report), puts his career on the line to prevent another cover-up.
Performances
Denzel Washington’s charismatic, deeply grounded, and moving performance anchors the movie. Meg Ryan was trying to transition at the time out of her role as America’s rom-com sweetheart, but was fairly miscast here. It’s clear she'd never done any voice-work before and therefore had no ability to handle the type of yelling that being a commanding officer in the military calls for. If ever there was a role “Aliens” star and Yale Drama School-trained Sigourney Weaver would have knocked completely out of the park—this was it.
As mentioned, Matt Damon (who lost a ton of weight for this role) is riveting. Similar to Scarlett Johansson in “Ghost World,” Julia Roberts in “Mystic Pizza,” Jack Black in “Bob Roberts,” and Natalie Portman in “Beautiful Girls,” it was immediately apparent in ’89 that the unknown Damon was a star on a fast trajectory.
