‘MoPic’ Shoots for Reality of War

The people who made “84 Charlie MoPic” (selected theaters) don’t want you to be superficially amused by their re-creation of the Vietnam War. They don’t want to pump you up with any apocalyptic razzle-dazzle or the old Stallone baloney. Instead, they want to hurl that war in your face, let you feel the heat and wind of the forest, the sweat of a long march, the stench of carnage, the blast of bullets or trip-mines tearing flesh. They want to rub your noses in fatigue, fear, casual profanity, graveyard yocks--all the naturalistic detritus and gritty minutiae of men facing death and trying to beat it.

Surprisingly often, they do.

“84 Charlie MoPic” has been somewhat overpraised, but the best of it has a cutting edge, a hard-bitten damn-your-eyes integrity. It’s a small, dedicated film with a killingly clear focus. It gives you the feeling of war by fixing on the little stuff: the way one G.I. keeps a pet lizard or another carefully washes his own socks, the modus operandi for defusing mines or fooling the enemy with phony cigarette litter--and all around, the ominous bird-song of the forest.

Writer-director Patrick Duncan tries for an ultrarealist illusion. He turns the film into a fake documentary: a collection of apparently unedited (and uncensored) footage shot by a MoPic, or Army motion-picture cameraman, accompanying a six-man reconnaissance team into the Central Highlands in 1969. This footage is intended for a mundane purpose, a training film to instruct raw recruits in the routines of jungle warfare: checking for mines, surviving in the forest, scouting enemy positions.

But the MoPic (Byron Thames) is an opportunist who keeps going further, digging into the men’s personal lives. He goads them into self-revelations, accompanies them everywhere.

At one point he is belly-down in the brush, while Viet Cong walk by several feet away, and a nearby soldier whose had his hand stabbed with a bamboo spear tries to keep from screaming. At another, he has got his camera practically in the face of a man being shot to pieces by a sniper and begging his buddies to kill him. And, at yet another, he lays down his equipment to throw himself into the action and rescue a comrade; it goes on recording the bloody action even after he leaves.

This MoPic is obviously getting footage that the Army is never going to show--in a training film or anywhere else. And he is shooting things that more than likely, the men on this mission--a five-man intelligence unit, bolstered by the MoPic and a young lieutenant (Jonathan Emerson)--wouldn’t even have allowed him to record: like the extreme close-up execution of a V.C. prisoner.

In the script, the conceit of the training film keeps breaking down. One moment, the steely-nerved leader, O.D. (Richard Brooks), is brusquely shoving MoPic away. But, shortly afterward, O.D. pays no attention, even though lens and microphone are hovering inches away while: 1) he confesses to the lieutenant that he pulled a gun on him, 2) taunts L.T. about the unlikelihood of a court martial without other officer witnesses and 3) promises to pull the trigger next time. (Talk about being comfortable in front of a camera. . . .)

Duncan’s script keeps swinging back and forth between his initial idea of the mock cinema verite framework, a really brilliant notion, and much of the plot he has cooked up, which is heavy on archetypal war-movie stories. Duncan has an ear for grunt jargon. He is an award-winning writer (for TV’s “Vietnam War Story”) and a Vietnam infantry veteran--but he has obviously seen a lot of movies as well.

We get the baptism of fire (“Platoon” and its many antecedents), the G.I. community in tight quarters (“The Story of G.I. Joe,” “A Walk in the Sun”), the squad picked off one by one on a dangerous mission (“Attack!” “Men in War”). And we also get prototypical characters: the wisecracker and the craven psycho (combined in Nicholas Cascone’s Easy); the hipster delinquent (Christopher Burgard’s Hammer), the Good ol’ Boy, (Glenn Morshower’s Cracker), the callowly ambitious officer (Jonathan Emerson’s L.T.) and the hard-as-nails, soft-as-tears sergeant (Brooks’ O.D.). Other than making the leader a black man, the movie isn’t exactly unpredictable. There’s a golden boy (Jason Tomlin’s Pretty Boy) whose luck is obviously running out; you can tell by the way his voice cracks. And there are soldiers who buy it seconds after being told it’s their last mission, and one more argument about shooting prisoners.

Duncan probably errs in one sense: believing he can make a Vietnam War movie without an overarching moral or mythic viewpoint, making himself into a camera, making a fiction that has the impersonality of truth caught on the fly. More than likely, he really wants to make a left-wing war film that won’t offend Vietnam veterans by preaching or making silly mistakes. There is an attitude here, and you can see it readily in L.T.’s speech about the war being a great business opportunity and Cracker’s about the Army being an equal-opportunity employer.

But what’s different, and what gives “84 Charlie MoPic” its undeniable force and feeling, is the framework: the sheer intensity generated by the limited-camera setups, the long takes and the purposely abrupt pans within a scene, the absence of background music, and the ingenious sound recording (by Michael Moore and Craig Woods)--which gives us the eerie bright chirpiness of a forest laden with death. And, more than anything, the quiet, deliberately offhand rhythms of the acting. Duncan and his fine young cast sustain the mood of lassitude and paranoia beautifully. They put a deceptively still, nervy edge into this film that almost hypnotizes you. This, we gradually begin to feel, is what war must be like: a long wait in deadly sunlight, a walk with banality and terror, nerves and boredom followed by chaos and the dark.