"Buffalo Soldiers"
Specialist Ray Elwood (Joachim Phoenix) had a choice to make - 6 months in prison or 3 years as a soldier in Uncle Sam's peacetime army. It's 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall and Elwood has set up a nice, cozy clerk's job for the commander of a US base in West Germany. Black marketeering, arms sales and heroine distribution are just some of Ray's favorite pastimes but it's all about to come to an end in "Buffalo Soldiers."
Australian director Gregor Jordon brought his work to Toronto in 2001 to open at the Toronto International Film Festival. That was on 10 September 2001. The next day the world had changed and the cynical, satirical "Buffalo Soldiers" - a less than flattering look into the peacetime US Army before the fall of the Wall - went into release hell. It was set to go to the big screen no fewer than five times over the past two years and, now, it finally makes its inauspicious debut.
During these politically correct times, when the US military has become a sacred cow for the nation, the release of a film that derides the Army as drug-addled, corrupt and incompetent will not be received well by the public. "Buffalo Soldiers" is that film.
In the beginning, we see through the eyes of Ray Elwood as he is dropped, like a bomb, from the belly of an airplane. He hurtles to earth at tremendous speed, then - thud! He slams into the ground. Ray's dream and fear of heights, we know, will have some bearing along the way.
Elwood is the chief clerk to the commander of the Theodore Roosevelt US Army Base, Col. Wallace Berman (Ed Harris). Berman is mostly concerned with getting his brigadier's star and doesn't question things like a requisition for 1000 gallons of Mop 'n' Glow - "cleanliness is next to godliness" he suggests to his subordinate, Ray. In true Ernie Bilko fashion, Elwood runs the base for his own aggrandizement, making deals with black marketers and supplying heroine to the head MP, Sgt. Saad (Sheik Mahmud-Bey), to sell on base. A wrench is thrown into Ray's not-so-good works when Top Sergeant Robert E. Lee (Scott Glenn) arrives and begins snooping around. Ray exacerbates the situation when he starts dating Lee's pretty daughter Robyn (Anna Paquin).
"Buffalo Soldiers," for the first half, holds much akin to Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H" and to "Catch-22." Ray, in fact, could be the grandson of the entrepreneurial Milo Minderbinder (played by Jon Voight) from the latter film. There is a very funny sequence where Ray helps one of his clients, Hicks (Glenn Fitzgerald), the commander of an Abrams tank, score some smack. Next day, on maneuvers, Hicks and his crew shoot up and end up crashing through the outdoor market of a nearby town, roll over a VW Beetle and devastate a gas station before returning to the field. It is both humorous and a statement about the boredom soldiers face during peacetime.
Unfortunately, the satire ceases at about the halfway mark and the mood of the film shifts to the quasi-serious as Sergeant Lee takes on the vendetta to "get" Elwood. This vengeance-is-mine theme is mixed in with a large-scale heroine-cooking project, a drug-addled shootout and Ray's final redemption. The shift from the first half's tongue-in-cheek humor to the varied angst and drama of the second half is not a smooth transition and "Buffalo Soldiers" suffers for it - never mind the political incorrectness of making fun of our now-beloved military,
Although the film may have its share of problems, Joachim Phoenix does a fine job in owning the role of Ray Elwood. He is the only thing that maintains an arc throughout the film - the story has so many threads and starting points that it feels like a collection of episodes - kind of like watching a pastiche of "Sergeant Bilko" shows.
The makers do a fair job of presenting the boredom of a peacetime Army and the things that its members do to get by. It's the wrong movie at the wrong time in this pro-military world and "Buffalo Soldiers" is not nearly strong enough to rise above political correctness. I give it a C+.
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