Oliver Stone returns to Vietnam for a third time — after "Platoon" and "Born on the Fourth of July" — and it proves to be one time too many.
"Heaven and Earth" is an inherently compelling story, focusing on a Vietnamese woman whose life was filled with huge tragedies and triumphs. But Stone's screenplay and direction are constantly at peak pitch, and his bombastic platitudes have never been less appropriate.
Newcomer Hiep Thi Le stars here as Le Ly Hayslip, born and raised in a small Vietnamese farming village that has been oppressed but generally left alone by the French — until the late 1950s. As she grows older, Le experiences the brutality of the war against the communists and watches as her village and family are torn apart by Viet Cong and Americans in an unwinnable power struggle.
In a way, Le is portrayed here to represent the entire Vietnamese population, and in particular those innocent peasants who suffered most during the war. And to his credit, Stone strives mightily for authenticity, using Asian actors and re-creating events as accurately as possible.
But where he falters is in trying to do too much and by making it all too big. Backed by an overwhelming score (by Japanese new-age musician Kitaro) and a soundtrack that is amplified to an often piercing level, Stone tells Le's story in episodic fashion, steadfastly refusing to flesh out details and characters and leaving far too many questions unanswered. He also takes every opportunity to make ugly Americans uniformly ugly.
We see Le's family brutalized, we see Le herself tortured and raped, and when she seems to have escaped the madness of the war raging in her own country by marrying a soldier and moving to the United States, her husband (Tommy Lee Jones playing another soft-spoken psycho) goes nuts and makes her life hellish once again.
Hiep Thi Le's central performance is generally quite good, though her voice-over narration is preachy and unnecessary. More satisfying is Joan Chen, who delivers a remarkable performance as Le's mother, despite being saddled with an unfortunate old-age makeup job toward the end. Also good is Haing S. Ngor, as Le's father, whose natural, soft-spoken dignity is welcome.
There is a story here that needs to be told, but Stone is probably not the right person to tell it. What's needed here is a softer touch, a more interior voice and a sense that Le survived all of this because she grew and became a survivor by virtue of tenacity and wit. As it is, she is simply dragged from one brutal sequence to the next.
"Heaven and Earth" is rated R for considerable violence and profanity, along with sex and nudity.