For reasons I can't quite explain, I've always liked Kevin Bacon. Maybe it's because there's a game named after him. Maybe I just really liked a movie he was in. I'm not even sure what the first movie of his was that I saw, actually. Maybe The River Wild? It wasn't Footloose, because I didn't see that until I was in high school. (And no, J, I still haven't seen Animal House.) I loved him in Mystic River. And there's also Murder in the First, Apollo 13, and of course JFK. And on top of all that, he's been married to Kyra Sedgwick for 22 years. Really, what's not to like? (Whoa, that's a lot of Kevin Bacon links. No wonder there's a game named after him. But wait, it gets better. You could spend hours doing this.)Okay, okay. Enough about him. Maybe I should actually talk about the movie I saw. Switch to a serious tone, because this is a true story, somehow both unhappy and uplifting.
I loved this movie, despite its terrible sadness. There is very little plot - Kevin plays Lieutenant Colonel Mike Strobl, who volunteers to escort the body of a fallen Marine named Chance Phelps back home to his parents. The whole movie is their journey.
During the movie, you never see Chance's face. You see different parts of his body - his hand, his wrist, his feet. But never his face, which implies that he could be anybody - any returning soldier, anyway.
And that's about all I can say: I hope the body of every soldier returning home gets the same respect that Chance did. The movie leaves you feeling that they do.
This is such a beautiful movie. I really loved it.
ReplyDeleteNow reading Matterhorn, a novel about the Vietnam war.
Good too. Guess we are going to be having lots of vets
returning very soon, hopefully mostly alive!
Love,
Mom
I loved this movie! It was so thought-provoking. If you're interested, I'll give you a copy of the article that Strobl wrote after he did this in real life. It's pretty much the same as the movie, but it's interesting, and pretty well-written too.
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