A Bright Shining Lie Reviews

Working without his usual collaborator, director Jim Sheridan, Irish screenwriter Terry George (IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, THE BOXER) directed this made-for-HBO feature about a significant, but heretofore unheralded, figure from the Vietnam war era. The film unfortunately errs by going in too many directions at once. Subsequent to its premiere on HBO, the film was released on home video. In 1962, John Paul Vann (Bill Paxton) is a US Army officer who requests assignment as an official observer in Vietnam. While there, he witnesses the haphazard manner in which the South Vietnamese army conducts the campaign against Communist forces in the North. Vann attempts to convince military brass that winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese is the only way to victory, but his pleas fall on deaf ears. Vann resigns. In his personal life, Vann cheats on his wife Mary Jane (Amy Madigan). Professionally, he works at a desk job, but he soon wants to journey back to Vietnam. He joins a civilian aid program, under the command of General Weyand (Ed Lauter), and assumes the role of US "civilian advisor" to the South Vietnamese army. Vann and partner Doug Elders (Eric Bogosian) quickly learn that providing aid to South Vietnamese villages means bribing their South Vietnamese allies. When Vann refuses to go along, his Asian staff members are butchered and his village home is base bombed. Weyand expands Vann's role to that of military advisor--in this way, Vann soon becomes a "commanding general" in charge of ten divisions of South Vietnamese troops (although still technically a civilian). As his stature grows, Vann becomes obsessed with beating North Vietnam's brilliant General Jiapp, causing friends like Elders and reporter Steven Burnett (Donal Logue) to feel that Vann has "sold out" his idealistic stance. After a hollow ceremony in which Vann is honored for engineering an attack on Jiapp's forces that in truth went horribly wrong, Vann is killed in a helicopter crash. Those familiar with Paxton only from his recent nice-guy turns in films like TWISTER (1996) and A SIMPLE PLAN (1998), will be surprised by his nuanced performance here as the hyper-macho Vann, a career military man who can no more stay away from battle than he can stay faithful to his wife. Other standout performances include Bogosian as the civilian advisor and Vivian Wu as the schoolteacher with whom Vann has an affair. Amy Madigan has little to do but fret in the role of Vann's long-suffering wife. Though George does seem at times to almost evade the actual subject of the conflict in Vietnam, detailing instead Vann's bumpy career and troubled marriage, the film's strength is its choice of subject: Vann had a bird's-eye-view of the conflict in Vietnam, and in fact has been heralded in recent years as a strategist who proposed policies (including the "hearts and minds" factor) that many believe might have won the war--or at least have ended it sooner. George, however, does bow to cliches at various points in the proceedings: at one point, Vann drunkenly walks past a brothel where a Vietnamese hooker greets him with, "I really, really like you, GI." Been there, done that in a dozen other movies, most notably PLATOON (1986) and FULL METAL JACKET (1987). In attempting to make A BRIGHT SHINING LIE the last word on Vietnam (Vann witnesses several seminal events at which he wasn't present in real life), George denies himself the opportunity to create a wholly original war film, one that gets inside the head of one man who was important in waging it. (Graphic violence, adult situations, profanity.)