"We Were Soldiers"

Wallace too often allows "We Were Soldiers" to sit in the puddle of its own melodrama, and Gibson, whose instincts should tell him otherwise, plays right into it. When Moore's lovable moppet of a daughter -- in the old days of the movie biz, you'd have called her a tot -- asks him what a war is, he stumbles through an awkwardly simplistic explanation along the lines of "Some people in another country or any country try to take the lives of other people, and it's the job of people like your daddy to go and stop them." It's a forced and highly moviefied treatment of a moment that Moore addresses much more simply, and more movingly, in his book: "I tried my best to explain, but her look of bewilderment only grew."

There are plenty of other moments that, even if they're based on real events, are dramatized in such a way that they almost throw you out of the movie. Wallace takes a tip from Philip Kaufman's "The Right Stuff" and tries to show the texture of the lives of the soldier's wives as they wait for news. But Wallace doesn't handle those scenes with the delicate forcefulness that Kaufman did: With the exception of one stunning moment by Simbi Kali Williams, they unfold like stock wartime footage of the brave womenfolk at home.

Worse yet, Wallace doesn't have a particular knack for battle sequences. They're extremely difficult to pull off: If war is chaos, how do you put it on a movie screen so it makes sense to viewers, so they always know where the opposing factions are in relation to each other? Wallace sets the scene well enough, showing us ragged swarms of Army helicopters, the military's newest and most potentially effective weaponry at the time, dipping and diving through a smoky, careworn landscape that might be beautiful under other circumstances. But for the most part, Wallace doesn't stage the fighting as clearly as he needs to; the action often feels confused and muddled, if also highly realistic.

But there are also sequences that, while they may not really work dramatically, at least suggest an underlying decency coupled with its natural and necessary twin, a sense of outrage. At one point, Gen. William Westmoreland calls Moore on the battlefield to inform him that he's going to be moved elsewhere, and Moore, battle-weary yet almost unnervingly alert, barks into the phone, "I will not leave my men!" as if he were dismissing a pesky telemarketer. (Might history have been different if more people had talked to Westmoreland that way?)

Wallace also doesn't shy away from the callousness of the U.S. government (nor did Moore, in his book): In the early days of the Vietnam War, the government sent news of soldiers' death to their families by telegram -- delivered in regular old yellow taxicabs. Wallace conveys the sense of menace those cabs came to represent for the wives at home; he shows them, glimpsed from behind the false security of cheerfully homey curtains, creeping tentatively alongside the curb like lumbering predators looking for their next victim.

"We Were Soldiers" contains one stunningly put-together sequence that takes place far from any battlefield. The soldiers leave Fort Benning for their tour of duty early in the morning, before daylight, in some cases before their families have awakened. A mere look passes between Klein's Geoghegan and his wife (Keri Russell) as they lie on their bed with their sleeping baby between them. In another house, Moore kisses Julie gently, so she barely stirs. Both men silently leave their homes, shouldering their packs and heading out on foot to the long line of inappropriately pedestrian-looking buses that will take them to their transport. Wallace shows the men in a long shot, with very little sound, gathering slowly in the still-shaky morning light, greeting one another with good humor that's all the more genuine for the way it's soaked in melancholy and apprehension.

Ostensibly, the battle sequences are the guts of Wallace's movie. But oddly enough -- and, unintentionally, to the movie's credit -- they're what you remember least when you leave the theater. "We Were Soldiers" doesn't break any new ground, and it treads some of the old ground too clumsily. But if nothing else, the sight of those men getting ready to board those pathetic-looking buses captures something of what it must have been like to leave home for a war whose aims were never clear (and, for many of us, never supportable). As Wallace shows it, those men must have felt isolation and comradeship in equal measures. Before long they'll understand that an ideological vacuum isn't a protective bubble, but a place where you have to fight to breathe.

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