Cutter's Way

America’s prolonged convalescence in the wake of the Vietnam/Indochina imbroglio (woken though it was by an injection of apocalyptic adrenaline by president Reagan) has been tackled by a myriad of talentless, sleazy hack-artists with iceberg egos to sink the titanic starting w/, I guess, Coppola. Substance-abusing-wife-beating-child-rapist Oliver Stone, the bloated talk-show-couch indenting dandy, managed to bleed his own Vietnam experiences for his two most awful (and most Oscar nominated?) films. So instead of watching Born on the Fourth of July (worst title of all time) and mistaking undercooked ham for emotion, dig into Cutter’s Way – the great post-Vietnam America-from-the-ground-up-to-the heavens binge-and-purge catharsis blast. Vietnam aside, Cutter’s Way / Cutter and Bone is the most important popular American political film with any aesthetics to it about the aftermath of ’68, the disease and dissention, the paranoid conspiracy science, and the panic of a grudge (that of the people) which will never find a target large enough to spend itself on (the man and his doubles). A hopeful film about there being no hope, then. Now that's something of a coup, no? And John Heard gives one of the best performances of the 80s. His is a precision-point wildness unheard of in the land of emoting. He is the anti-Richard Burton. Graceful yet utterly mordant. When asked why his whisky-swilling vet isn't drinking his face off after a too-close-to-home death: "tragedy I take straight."