The opening scenes of Buffalo Soldiers does not take place in Mongolia and it does not feature Cameron Diaz. But for a brief panic stricken moment I thought it might. Since I wasn’t the only one rummaging around in my purse to double check my ticket it could only mean stupid working the projectors was messing around. Twenty minutes later Joanquin Pheonix is falling off a building. Ahh, much better.
A week prior as I purchased tickets to another film I heard two guys asking a girl what Buffalo Soldiers was about. She had no idea. Neither did her friends. I hadn’t heard of it either but managed to find a small pile of tiny preview cards. The cast list was impressive, but, why was this movie so low profile?
Buffalo Soldiers collected dust on a shelf until it was deemed appropriate to show to the world. Even now it seems to almost be creeping around cinemas mostly undetected. It is a shame as it’s by no means a perfect film, but it is one worth seeing.
Joanquin Pheonix is Elwood, a soldier on an army base in West Germany 1989 before the fall of the Berlin Wall. While initially he appeared to be dark and brooding it’s soon evident Elwood is a charismatic and apathetic guy with quite a large chip on his shoulder. ’’Peace is f**king boring!’’ he snarls while a fellow soldier is accidentally killed during a game of football. To ease the boredom Elwood is busy dealing drugs and dabbling in Germany’s booming black market with a couple of buddies. But the arrival of his tough new superior (Scott Glen) makes life more difficult for him.
Joanquin Pheonix is very good as Elwood, giving an undesirable character a very likeable edge. Ed Harris gives a good performance of Elwood’s spacey and good natured Commander. Scott Glen as the new officer is hard, twisted and set on destroying Elwood. His daughter is playfully played by Anna Paquin, the love interest.
At times it’s difficult to determine what sort of a movie Buffalo Soldiers wants to be. I expected the overall feel to be darker and was surprised to find myself chuckling at the many lighter moments. It’s a clever satire that doesn’t apologise for it’s controversial subject matter. The soldiers are bored to tears and seemingly have nothing else to do but to take, buy and sell drugs. The core of the film is undeniably dark, yet the execution is more entertaining than disturbing.
I saw it as a sort of a slice-of-life film. Though the subject matter is serious, the setting important, Buffalo Soldiers in many ways plays like ’’a day in the life of...’’ type of film. Our hero doesn’t grow as a person, he doesn’t learn life’s meaning along the way and that could be one of the very reasons that this film works so very well. One of the problems I tend to have with films is that too often they employ the idea of everything working out in the end, bad people turning good and such. While an attractive concept, the cynic in me tends to see the Hollywood in such things before seeing the beauty in it. Perhaps it’s for this reason that Buffalo Soldiers remains an authentic piece of film. Elwood doesn’t change his behaviour, his actions or his life. It’s reality.
The first half of Buffalo Soldiers is very good. It’s a dark and uneasy set up of life in an army base that closely resembles the social hierarchy found in any schoolyard. It’s also a deliberate comment on the responsibility placed on the ’’kids’’ that make up the American Army. We see these soldiers in combat training one minute and bickering like children the next. In regards to the character of Elwood it’s an interesting study of a character that could be the typical loner, the leader of the pack and the entrepreneur all rolled into one. Set all this in with a very 80’s look and sound and it works quite well.
Where the film started to get away from itself was in the second half where not only does the plot border on silly, but the brilliantly dark tone changes. At some times I felt I might be watching a typical action flick, at other times it was almost a teen movie. The ending is particularly out of place with buildings exploding and people being dangled over windows. I almost expected Bruce Willis to come running around the corner to save the day!
Buffalo Soldiers is a film worth seeing if only that it offers an alternative to the typical movies being churned out. It offers an interesting view into a world most wouldn’t have seen before and the performances are as good as you’d expect from the excellent cast. Would have been a four star rating if not for the unforgivable and misplaced Hollywood-style ending.