My World of Flops Oliver Stone's Chick Flick Case File #193/Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #242 Heaven and Earth (1993)
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1993’s Heaven and Earth is a real anomaly in Oliver Stone’s filmography. It’s an outlier not because it’s about Vietnam or the life of a real person. LOTS of Stone’s movies involve that unfortunate kerfuffle in Southeast Asia and/or the dramatic lives of real people.
No, Heaven and Earth is unique because of the real life being dramatized and their relationship to the Vietnam War. Instead of being based on the writer-director’s own experiences, like Platoon, or soldier-turned-activist Ron Kovic, like Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven and Earth is about a South Vietnamese woman whose life is transformed by the war and her doomed marriage to a haunted, alcoholic soldier played by Tommy Lee Jones.
In his previous films about Vietnamese, Stone didn’t seem particularly interested in the experiences of either women or the Vietnamese. They were relegated unmistakably to the background of hero’s journeys from innocence and naiveté to hard-won wisdom and experience. But in Heaven and Earth, which is based on a pair of memoirs by Le Ly, the experiences of Vietnamese women receive a spotlight as unexpected as it is welcome.
Stone isn’t just a male filmmaker: he’s an outsized cartoon of macho boorishness. The man’s resume includes Scarface and Conan the Barbarian, for the love of God. He didn’t just collaborate with Brian De Palma and John Milius; he wrote movies that were macho even by their standards.
Yet with Heaven and Earth, Stone made his version of a women’s picture as well as a movie that looks at American life from the outside in, from the perspective of an immigrant overwhelmed by the abundance of consumer culture as well as the casual and not so casual racism of the very white, very Christian family she marries into.
That Oliver Stone was able to command a sizable budget for a biopic about a South Vietnamese woman who was raped, abused and tortured, starring a complete unknown, is a testament to the extraordinary power he wielded at the time it was green-lit.
Stone had just come off JFK, a three hour long frenzy of half-baked conspiracy theories that grossed a quarter billion dollars, was nominated for a plethora of major Academy Awards and was major news for months.
Heaven and Earth is much more modest in scope and ambition than Stone’s usual fare but he got an Oliver Stone budget for it all the same, which unsurprisingly resulted in the movie losing a small fortune due to its screamingly non-non-commercial subject matter.
Like Born on the Fourth of July before it, Heaven and Earth begins in a place of Edenic innocence, with an idyllic calm before the storm. We open with our narrator (newcomer Hiep Thi Le) waxing rhapsodic about her homeland at peace before French and American forces squared off against the Viet Cong in a bloody and destructive war.
Cinematographer Robert Richardson, the MVP on damn near every Stone movie he shot, captures both the lush green beauty of Southeast Asia and the horrors of war. It’s a film at once gorgeous and brutal, full of visual poetry and visceral horror.
For Ly Ly, her family and a country devastated by war, survival is everything. They’re caught between worlds and ideologies, threatened at all times by all sides, trapped hopelessly in the conflict between capitalism and Communism, the East and the West.
Ly Ly eventually secures work with a family but when she is impregnated by the man of the house she is once again left to fend for herself in a cruel world that takes sadistic glee in crushing the spirits of lesser souls.
Our strong-willed heroine will do anything to get by, whether that means selling cigarettes on street corners or her body to men. Then one day she meets Steve Butler (Tommy Lee Jones), an American soldier who doggedly pursues and eventually marries her.
They move to the United States and start a family seeking a new beginning in a land at once strange and familiar but are followed everywhere by the ghosts and sins of their pasts. There’s a wonderful scene where Ly Ly encounters a grocery store in her new home that’s less a mere place to purchase food than a glittering capitalist wonderland beyond her imagination.
Jones delivers a powerful performance that alternates between aching tenderness and bottomless rage. His haunted veteran desperately wants to be a good family man and human being but he has seen and done so many awful, unforgivable and brutal things that he’s fundamentally beyond redemption.
Ly Ly eventually finds the strength to leave her husband and seek out her own destiny.
Hiep Thi Le was barely old enough to drink legally when she was plucked from obscurity and given the challenging lead role of a woman who endures the torments of the damned in her furious struggle for survival. She was almost assuredly too young and too inexperienced to carry the film on her slight shoulders but she indelibly captures the helplessness that comes with being tossed to and fro by the raging waters of history as well as the vulnerability that comes with not being in control of your fate.
Heaven and Earth is shapeless and excessive at two hours and twenty minutes. It’s episodic and rambling but also beautifully shot and surprisingly moving. I found myself liking it precisely because it’s so unlike Stone’s other movies, including his other two films about the Vietnam War.
I’m not at all surprised that Heaven and Earth failed miserably at the box-office and received mixed reviews. I would have been shocked if a movie this modest and defiantly non-commercial had found a mass audience.
Heaven and Earth doesn’t feel like an Oliver Stone movie. For me that’s one of its greatest strengths. The bad boy filmmaker took some huge risks here and while they did not pay off critically or commercially during its release the film has aged far better than his other films of the time, in part because Heaven and Earth is deliberately much more sensitive in regards to issues of race and gender and consequently less wildly racist and sexist.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Secret Success
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