Winter Soldier
New Yorker Video, $24.95
On January 31, 1971, more than 125 Vietnam veterans gathered in a conference room at a Howard Johnson’s in Detroit for a reckoning. Over three days of voluntary testimony, they rattled off a litany of crimes against humanity so brutal and willfully malevolent as to give almost anyone pause, especially an American population still trusting in its own delusional sense of decency and fair play. These young men mapped in unnerving detail the length and breadth of the Vietnam war and of their own complicity in it – beatings, rapes, burnings, mutilations, torture – all 125 with stories to tell more horrible than the last, all 125 willing to admit their own failures and transgressions in order to save their souls and the soul of a country that had so callously misused their youth. Along with these soldiers, there came a group of 18 young filmmakers. Calling themselves the Winterfilm Collective and including such soon-to-be-noted documentary directors as Barbara Kopple (Harlan County, USA) and Robert Fiore (Pumping Iron), they were intent on capturing every second of what proved to be one of the most singular and significant events in American military and protest history. The result, Winter Soldier (rarely seen since its 1972 debut at Cannes), is about as troubling, fascinating, and depressing as documentaries get: 95 minutes long, stark in its form – nothing but soldiers confessing their sins, shot almost entirely in unnerving black-and-white close-ups, tempered only occasionally by outside footage, until the claustrophobia is almost palpable. The movie is unrelenting from beginning to end, consisting of the worst story you’ve ever heard followed hard upon by the worst story you’ve ever heard, ad nauseum; the same themes and ideas repeat over and over, like machine-gun fire: the trained dehumanization, the unquestioned notions of American masculinity, the forced indifference to human life, the fear, the ruthlessness, and the casual brutality. Not exactly family viewing, but if there are films of real social significance in this world, we can safely count Winter Soldier among them.
Also Out Now
The Producers (Universal, $29.98): Why anyone would sit through two hours of Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane when there’s a perfectly good Zero Mostel/Gene Wilder picture out there is beyond me.
Upcoming
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Collector’s Edition (20th Century Fox, $26.98): As the man said, the fall will kill you.
This article appears in June 2 • 2006.