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"dogfight"

"dogfight" image
Parent Issue
Month
February
Year
1993
Copyright
Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
Rights Held By
Agenda Publications
OCR Text

Directed by Nancy Savoca Starring River Phoenix and Lili Taylor   It's November 1963. Corporal Eddie Birdlace (River Phoenix) is almost 19 and on his way to San Francisco. He and his three  best friends are on their last Marine liberty before shipping out for a little-known country called Vietnam. The four Bs (as they are called, having met in alphabetical line-up during infantry training) are on a mission to find the "ugliest" date and to have her unknowingly compete for first prize.

The rules of the "dogfight" are simple - the game brokers must be polite and pay for cocktails and beer. The prize is $100. The story centers on Eddie, and his chosen date, Rose Fenney (Lili Taylor), a waitress at her mother's restaurant. Rose is unattractive by conformist standards and pathetically innocent. (It's almost unbearable to watch the scene in which Rose tries on and rejects all her ill-fitting dresses for her big date with Eddie.) Rose dreams of becoming a folk singer and wants to "do something in the world like join the Peace Corps or help out down South." As can be expected, Eddie and Rose's worldviews clash and create fireworks, culminating in love.

Eddie, before being confronted by Rose, is the quintessential puffed up, ignorant, macho dude. He brags to Rose that he joined the Marines because a recruiter told him "Eleanor Roosevelt said you look like an overworked, underfed, oversexed, killing machine. That's what she says about Marines and you look like a Marine to me."

In turn, Eddie and his friends believe that their deceits, such as the dogfight, won't hurt anyone if they don't know about them. Sadly, for the four Bs, entertainments like the dogfight, fighting squids (Navy men) and negotiating three-for-$10 blow jobs equal liberty. The film humorously condemns the narrow cultural conformity that makes it so easy to be righteously deceitful.

"Let me tell you something about bullshit," Corporal Berzir(Richard Panelbianco) explains to Eddie. "It's everywhere. You hit me with a little, I buy it. I hit you with a little, you buy it. It doesn't make us idiots. That's what makes us buddies. We buy what the Corps hands out and that's what makes us Marines. And the Corps is buying all the bullshit from President Kennedy and President Kennedy is buying the bullshit from everybody in the U.S.-of-fucking-A. And that's what makes us Americans." Exemplifying this bullshit-buying is the lack of thought Eddie has obviously put in to joining the Marines, choosing friends or judging women.

This bittersweet film is nearly perfect in its storyline, casting, score, direction and message. It pays special tribute to the great folk singers of old. Holly Near(who carries on that tradition) is featured as Rose's mother, and much of the score is made up of Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, Odetta and Dylan ballads. Rose tells Eddie that real folk singers write and sing their own thoughts and therefore what they say goes to the soul. Her message is that love power is stronger than the war machine. And in the end, love is truly what holds all the characters together.

Lili Taylor as Rose is brilliant, blending a clearly painful vulnerability with a powerful security of vision. Her hesitant but heartfelt rendition of Malvina Reynold's "Just a Little Rain" is truly moving. River Phoenix is beyond exceptional. His timing and the flow of his language (both verbal and physical) have you believing that Eddie is a real person. His metamorphosis from an insensitive lout to a feeling human being is actually believable. That's a lot to ask an actor to do.

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Subjects
Old News
Agenda