Gardens of Stone movie review (1987)
Francis Coppola's "Gardens of Stone" tells the stories of several relationships at this outpost far behind the front lines. The film introduces the kid (D. B. Sweeney), his immediate superior (James Caan) and the sergeant above him (James Earl Jones). And then there is the girl the kid would like to marry (Mary Stuart Masterson), and there is Caan's new girlfriend (Anjelica Huston), who works for the Washington Post and considers the Vietnam War to be genocide.
Many of the movie's best scenes take place in Caan's civilian apartment, with long dinners with candlelight and wine and passionate conversations about what is right and what is wrong.
The kid wants to go to OCS, and then he wants to be assigned to the front. He wants to see combat. The two older soldiers see things a little differently. They would rather be fighting, too, and they hate the cemetery detail and their ceremonial duties, but they believe the war in Vietnam is stupid because the politicians are hamstringing the professionals, preventing them from fighting to win.
The movie's purpose is to re-create a specific time and place. The network news brings the reality of Vietnam home every night, and peace demonstrators march on the Pentagon, and at a cocktail party Caan is insulted by a long-haired liberal. But the kid seems to exist outside this time and place; he's an Army brat, brought up to be patriotic, a good soldier. He doesn't much seem to care about the political issues involved. He just wants to see action. His enthusiasm is the despair of the older soldiers who care for him.
The movie creates its characters with realism, love and detail. The romance between Caan and Huston is one of the great adult love stories in recent movies, and the fact that they are such different people makes it even more emotionally involving. The kid is complicated, too, and we find that out when he runs into his college sweetheart (Masterson) and finds that she is still in love with him - that she would have married him if he'd had the guts to stand up to her father, a senior officer who didn't want his daughter marrying "beneath" herself in the ranks.
