THE DARTMOUTH ARTS
FRIDAY, JULY 21, 2017
PAGE 7
Film Review: ‘The Vietnam War’ recognizes distinct perspectives By ALI HUNTER and WALKER SCHNEIDER The Dartmouth
The Vietnam War doesn’t fit neatly into American folklore. Unlike other American wars, it is not easily glorified. It cannot be summarized as “the good guys won, and the bad guys lost.” As a result, the war is one of the most emotionally charged and complex episodes in American history. Even though the last American soldiers left Saigon decades ago, one crucial fact was impressed on the audience in Spaulding Auditorium last Thursday night: the Vietnam War is as relevant today as it was 40 years ago. On July 13, the Hopkins Center for the Performing Arts screened some clips from “The Vietnam War,” a documentary film directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. The directors themselves sat on a panel following the screening, joined by two interviewees who appeared in the film. Spaulding Auditorium was full to standing
room. To us, the crowd looked like most crowds at Dartmouthsponsored lectures: faculty, some interested students, some not-sointerested students and a lot of retirees. It seemed like a normal crowd, until Burns asked all those who had served in the Vietnam War to rise for recognition. Around 50 men and women stood up. Two rose to their feet right in front of us. These two men could have stood in front of us in line at Dirt Cowboy or walked past us on the Green, and we wouldn’t have batted an eye. And yet here they were, a living testament to the Vietnam War. This fact was not coincidental. A large portion of Burns and Novick’s documentary is dedicated to revising the notion that Vietnam is a bygone war in a bygone era. The fighting has stopped, but Burns and Novick’s film shows that the conflict is very much still present in American and Vietnamese psyches. This is not an informational documentary in the classic sense.
The voice-over narration takes a significant backseat to the interviews of those who lived through the war. The film prioritizes color over chronology, individuality over generalizations. The bulk of the preview played on Thursday night was comprised of interviews of American and Vietnamese veterans and civilians. Each interview was a subjective retelling of history. It was the Vietnam War through that specific person’s eyes. However, by showcasing so many individual experiences, Burns and Novick find some of the objective narrative of the war. This narrative is not what you’d expect. In the U.S., memory of the Vietnam War tends to focus exclusively on the American experience. T he film delves poignantly into that experience, but it also challenges the U.S.centered perception of the war. “What I think sets this documentary apart [from other works on the Vietnam War] is the number and variety of Vietnamese voices and perspectives,”
commented history professor Ed ward Miller, who advised B u r n s o n t h e d o c u m e n t a r y. This was a conscious effort: the filmmaker s spent months in Vietnam, conducting interviews that appear throughout the film. The result is that this documentary stands out from its peers, boldly challenging how popular culture depicts the war. Whether in print journalism, “Forrest Gump” or “Apocalypse Now,” previous representations of the Vietnam War have followed an almost Manichaean logic: good versus evil, communist versus democrat. Burns and Novick bring the focus back to the individual. Each perspective shared in the film is given validity, whether from a U.S. soldier, Viet Cong or civilian from either country. By including Vietnamese experiences, the film questions the traditional dichotomous view of the war and the current understanding of the conflict. The film has another important message: inter-societal healing.
“I think all of us who worked on it are hopeful that it will allow Americans with diver se and divergent memories of the war to share their experiences with each other,” Miller said. Both in Vietnam and in the U.S., ideological turmoil lives on. The opening thesis of the documentary is that the war was followed by silence, in which societal cleavages were not addressed. Now, viewers can listen to a multiplicity of opinions and experiences: American, Vietnamese, pro-war, pacifist. Last Thursday, veterans and protesters had their perspectives validated, heard and respected. Hopefully, they did the same to differing perspectives. This is why this documentary promises an extraordinary impact. It reopens a conversation that will result in a newer and more nuanced understanding of the Vietnam War, the effects of which are still ricocheting around society today. Rating: 9/10
Film Review: ‘The Big Sick’ is a robust rom-com, but not much else By JOYCE LEE The Dartmouth Staff
As a film, “The Big Sick” is an unconventional addition to a long tradition of romantic comedies with memorable protagonists that include the likes of “When Harry Met Sally,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and “Notting Hill.” Kumail Nanjiani stars as Kumail, a character based on his early life as a standup comic who falls in love with psychology graduate student and quintessential girl next door, Emily, a somewhat underutilized Zoe Kazan, who is based on Nanjiani’s wife in real life, Emily Gordon. He battles family expectations, career mishaps and a cultural misunderstanding — as well as the fact that Emily falls into a coma halfway through the film. It’s here that the biggest flaw in “The Big Sick” becomes apparent. I would describe Emily as an “every girl” because that is, in essence, how she is portrayed. For a film that calls itself a romantic comedy, one half of the couple is disproportionately underwhelming. The film spends 40 minutes of its two hour run time intermittently checking in on the character as one of the many objects orbiting Kumail’s life. She is funny, interesting and pretty — but then again, so is every other romantic comedy heroine. It’s to Kazan’s credit that a certain amount of wry nervousness is injected into her character, but spending the majority of the second half of a film lying comatose would be too large of an
obstacle for any character actor to overcome. But Emily’s leave of absence from the film brings an unexpected gift in the form of her parents — Holly Hunter and Ray Romano give stunning performances as Beth and Terry. Perhaps the most riveting moment in the film is a fight between the two. The air is charged with what is unspoken, and Beth circles Terry for a moment like a predator before letting out a pained whimper and dashing away to her daughter. Kumail watches the fight with the air that such an encounter is a rare sight in his family’s household. Next to Beth and Terry, Kumail’s parents, played by Zenobia Shroff and Anupam Kher, are almost painfully one note. They are mostly comedic fodder, with none of the depth that is given to Emily’s parents. They are also the source of a large conflict between Kumail and Emily, seeming to exist only to parade a large selection of eligible Pakistani women in front of Kumail, deliver wry comments about the evils of American fast food culture and towards the end of the film, deliver what even the film seems to consider the typical immigrant parent monologue about their sacrifice for their children. Let’s not avoid the elephant in the room. Kumail is not Billy Crystal, Colin Firth or Hugh Grant. He’s introduced as a Pakistani-American who immigrated to the U.S. after high school. This movie is not “A Movie About Race,” but it is an American
film that contains a South Asian man as its main lead. The comments are not subtle. Viewers are introduced to Kumail with a montage of life in Pakistan, overlaid with audio from a set in Kumail’s standup, where he ironically describes Pakistan as a place very similar to America. Kumail’s one-man-show barrages his audience with seemingly irrelevant and somewhat dull facts about Pakistan. He is clearly a man dealing with his identity as an PakistaniAmerican. That is the first established trait of this character. But the people who seem to know and love him the most don’t understand this dilemma, nor how this might lead to Kumail dealing with his internal struggles by lying. He lies to his family about studying for the LSAT and waiting patiently for the right Pakistani girl, and he lies to Emily about their relationship and his resignation to an arranged marriage. The lies are not one-sided. After his one man show, Emily and his friends all tell him through their gritted teeth that they enjoyed his performance and the many facts about Pakistan. The source of Kumail’s lying is never completely addressed or explained between these characters. Kumail ultimately tells the truth that he is dating Emily, a white woman, to his parents, and that he will continue pursuing stand-up as a career. In an earlier scene, Kumail and Emily effectively break up because she discovers his box of photographs of potential arranged marriage candidates and realizes that there is
no future to their relationship. But the essential question is never asked between these characters: why does he lie, and how does he stop lying? Being a member of an ethnic minority in America dealing with the cultural clash between two or even more identities means that one must constantly switch between a series of selves. Here is the Kumail who is Emily’s boyfriend, here is the Kumail whose only friends seem to be white standup comics and here is the Kumail who eats dinner with his parents every week and pretends to pray before dinnertime in the garage. It is only when Kumail meets Emily’s parents that Kumail halts his constant shuffling between identities. It is this dynamic that becomes the redeeming factor of this film. Kumail bonds with Beth as she relates how her conservative, military family in North Carolina despised Terry for his New Yorker, civilian roots. Emily’s family and their transparency to each other are the foil to Kumail’s. Kumail hides everything from the fact that the girl coming to dinner is not a coincidence to the fact that he is no longer certain that he believes in Allah from his parents. Since Kunail’s relationship with Beth and Terry initially has little emotional weight, there is little to be lost if he is open and honest with them. It is to their credit that we, as viewers, spend the majority of the film with a Kumail who becomes increasingly honest with himself and with the people around him. It has to be acknowledged that while the contrast between Emily’s
family and Kumail’s family is obvious, it contains a context that the film is ultimately unable to approach. The conversation towards the end of the film, where Kumail is finally honest with his parents, is almost too painful to watch because of the weight of truth for Kumail and his parents. While Emily is honest with her parents about her troubles with her boyfriend, Kumail is hiding his hopes, his dreams, his love and even his faith. There is no way for him to repay his parents for their sacrifice, and to disrespect that even more by denying them their wishes is a heartbreaking notion that Kumail makes clear when he abruptly interrupts their monologue. This was a development I wish had occurred sooner in the film and explored with as much meaningful depth as Kumail’s developing relationship with Beth and Terry. “The Big Sick” is ultimately a thoughtful and honest film that approaches a number of themes but does not ultimately become The Movie about the big, overarching ideas it intersects. It is, instead, dedicated first and foremost to creating a romantic comedy loosely based on Nanjiani’s relationship with his wife. The film doesn’t pretend to be anything more than entertaining, and for a movie that is ultimately about a man and his girlfriend in a coma, it accomplishes a lot to be a funny and introspective two hours of film. Rating: 6/10