Film Reviews : ‘Distant Thunder’ a Superficial Look at Vets

“Distant Thunder” (citywide) is a traumatizing experience. Yet it has a promising subject: Vietnam War bush vets, traumatized combat veterans who’ve exiled themselves to the wilderness.

In this case, bush vet Mark Lambert (John Lithgow) tries, after 16 years, to re-establish ties with his teen-age son Jack (Ralph Macchio). It’s a symbolic reunion, America reconciling the scars of past violence (as in “Running on Empty”), while father and son meet in the primeval wilds, the heart of darkness. There, we can expect a baptism of fire, some soul-stripping, core-revealing crisis, to dampen the hell of Vietnam.

If that plot description sounds relentless, so is the movie’s rhythm. Director Rick Rosenthal (“Halloween 2”) and writer Robert Stitzel seem to have taken the thunder as their keynote, timed everything to the beat of a kettledrum. Ka-boom!

Ka-boom! Ka-boom! go the visuals: fire-fights in Vietnam, muddy primordial greens in the British Columbia forests, close-ups of phallic knives. Ka-boom! Ka-boom! goes the sound track: guns roar, branches crackle, bigots sneer. Ka-boom! goes Maurice Jarre’s score: a pounding stew of synthesizer Angst. And Ka-boom! Ka-boom! goes the direction and acting, both heavy on statuesque poses, long lingering stares and meaningful silences. This last is appropriate. The dialogue is such a farrago of profanity and cliches, interpersed with sermons, that the silences are more meaningful.

John Lithgow was probably the wrong actor for Mark. He gets the externals extremely well, the husky voice, the hair-trigger temper, the shaggy, shivering pain, but there’s no surprise in his role. And Macchio’s Mark is written in the whole ‘80s “superman” syndrome: he’s not just an average, sensitive teen-ager, but a valedictorian, all-state academic champ. Yet he’s also a regular kid, movie-style. He talks in monosyllabic cliches and profanity, just like everybody else.

“The Trouble with life is, it’s unpredictable,” Jack’s mom (Janet Margolin) tells him. That’s not the movie’s trouble.

Everything is heavy, heavy. There’s so much soul-stripping you want to ask the actors to cover up, show some modesty. Lithgow’s bearded, tormented Mark wanders around in gray, staring off toward gathering clouds. Kerrie Keane’s girlfriend Char seems to be struggling under a burden of compassion; Jamey Sheridan’s jilted Moss staggering with a hernia of prejudice and jealousy.

And the bush vets themselves lurch around like zombie weirdos. One of them (Tom Bower) marches head-on into a train. Another (Denis Arndt) cackles like a madman, fixing his false teeth with Gummi Bears. The third (Reb Brown) wanders around like a forest Terminator, killing people and muttering “No trespassing.” When Mark and Jack finally meet, they don’t even say “Hello.” They just strike statuesque poses and start stripping their souls.

At the end of the film, Rosenthal and Stitzel daringly take cinema back to “Intolerance.” Macchio races the train to save his dad, tied to the tracks by more of Stitzel’s profanity and cliches. This isn’t even a regression, Griffith did it much better in 1916--though to be fair to Stitzel, he’s probably copying not Griffith but the climax of Vittorio De Sica’s 1952 “Umberto D.” (That’s also much better.)

“Distant Thunder” (MPAA rated R, for profanity, if not cliches) clearly wants sympathy for trauma-ridden veterans, a fine goal. But its superficiality becomes condescending. Does the movie want us to believe Lithgow and his buddies have been like this for 16 years? Dementia praecox, interrupted with a little fern-picking, “train-kissing” and an occasional massacre? This is “Coming Home” in a “Friday the 13th” context. These aren’t bush vets; they’re some new kind of Walking Dead. And this isn’t a problem drama. It’s nothing but a problem, set to the beat of a kettledrum. Ka-boom!