Close-Order Moral Drill

TITLE: A FEW GOOD MEN

DIRECTOR: ROB REINER

WRITER: AARON SORKIN

THE BOTTOM LINE: Good direction and acting turn an old-fashioned melodrama into a wickedly entertaining movie.

A Few Good Men opens with an elite Marine drill team, resplendent in dress blues, executing spectacular variations on the manual of arms. In itself an entrancing sequence, it comes to symbolize something more as the film develops.

For one thing, director Rob Reiner’s realization of this passage is an omen of all the crispness to come in an extraordinarily well-made movie, which wastes no words or images in telling a conventional but compelling story. All its scenes have been polished till they shine like brass belt buckles at a regimental parade. More important, metaphorically the few good men of that drill team have attained the military ideal — perfect order, perfect discipline. They are, for their brief moment, an impossible dream made manifest. And a vivid contrast to the rest of the action.

For life, as you may have noticed, is not a close-order drill. Even in the Marines things get messy. At the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba, known to servicemen as Gitmo, a private is dead — the result of harassment by two members of his platoon. The victim was a screw-up who compounded his sins by stepping outside the chain of command to report a rules infraction and seek a transfer. A “Code Red” — informal disciplinary action by his barracksmates — is suspected. But are the offenders wholly culpable? Or did they act under orders (or tacit encouragement) from superior officers?

Precisely because of this embarrassing possibility, the Navy assigns Lieut. Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise, proving again that a really cute guy can also act really acutely) to defend them at their court-martial. Kaffee’s life is all softball, brewskies and smart remarks — evasions of his grownup responsibilities, his large lawyerly talents and the long shadow of his great- man father. To him, principles are merely things that interfere with cozy plea bargains. He is, in fact — neat balance here — an upmarket version of this case’s victim, a goof-off in need of some kind of Code Red himself.

It is administered consciously by a ferocious associate, unconsciously by a fearsome opponent. The former is Lieut. Commander Joanne Galloway (a marvelously intense Demi Moore, acting as if she’s never read Vanity Fair, let alone appeared on its cover). Instinctively sensing that a cover-up is in the making, she keeps hectoring Kaffee toward heroism. The antagonist is Colonel Nathan R. Jessep, Marine commander at Gitmo, not so much played as demonized by Jack Nicholson — a wickedly smart psychopath, utterly self-confident and self-righteous. Nicholson sees the humor in this dark character but then freezes each potential laugh with a gaze that is hostile to anything not on his own agenda.

Kaffee’s only hope of saving his clients is to break Jessep on the stand, to make the court see that the colonel’s rage for order is the ultimate source of the Code Red. Here, of course, we enter familiar (or Caine Mutiny) territory. And here writer Aaron Sorkin, adapting his own play, finds another obvious psychological balance: confronting a powerful older man, Kaffee is also confronting his forbidding father’s memory.

Men is a little too neat structurally, its moral and human issues a little too clear-cut: at heart it is old-fashioned melodrama. But Sorkin’s dialogue | is spit-shined, and the energy and conviction with which it is staged and played is more than a compensation; it’s transformative. And hugely entertaining.