|
Richard Nixon looms on the screen. "We live in an age of anarchy both abroad and at home," he intones over footage of flaming jungles and roiling campuses. On that nauseating note, one that resonates anew in today’s political climate, Jay Craven’s meditation on Vietnam, Kent State, and the draft-fearing summer of ’70 begins in earnest. An ensemble of young adults — a lawyer modeling himself after Bobby Kennedy, a teacher fired for her anti-war beliefs, a student tailed by the feds for fomenting the Kent State protests — inhabit a plot so predictable and platitude-plagued that it soon feels like a missed opportunity. Take a scene when the lawyer and the token black guy puff a joint while musing on martyred leaders. "They’re all dead. Who’s left?" says one. "Bobby would have taken us out of ’Nam," says the other. Maybe everything there is to say about the ’60s has finally been said. Craven is an intuitive director — take his inspired interweaving of stock footage, as when he juxtaposes cops carting away limp protesters with grunts carrying their wounded brethren. That such scenes are in the news once again only calls to mind the provocative parallels he might have probed but doesn’t. (104 minutes)
BY MIKE MILIARD
|
