I watched a tape of "A Soldier's Sweetheart" with my fellow creative writing graduate students. We had all dissected the original story, "The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" earlier this semester under the guidance of novelist Darcey Steinke, who is the University of Mississippi's visiting Southern writer-in-residence.
The movie spent 2 hours telling a story that could have been told in 1 hour, yet it still muddled author Tim O'Brien's main theme: the telling of a story. The other theme, how women would react to a war, was explored pretty well. The casting was effective, though.
Just for everyone's information, here's the plot: "Rat", an infantryman in Vietnam, is telling a story to his squad mates, who think he's telling a tall tale at first, until he keeps laying out consistent details and candidly admits that he can't guarantee the parts of the story that he didn't witness himself.
Spoiler warning!
The story is about his old outfit, a MASH unit with no officers on top of a hill that they share with a Special Forces (Green Berets) team. One of the medics sneaks his girlfriend, Marianne, over from Cleveland via Braniff Airlines and USO shuttles. At first, it's like a little vacation, but as Marianne learns to tend the wounded, shoot an M-16, cook and speak Vietnamese, and hike and swim in the jungle, she goes through a spiritual transformation, "Vietnam makes me glow in the dark" "I can feel my blood moving". She tells her boyfriend, who thinks it's time to send her back, that this is the happiest she's ever been.
When she disappears for the night, her boyfriend assumes she's cheating on him, but learns that she has begun to accompany the Green Berets on ambushes. He lays down the law with her, but soon she goes out again with the Green Berets, but grows impatient even with them. She quits wearing boots and stops using a rifle (the movie version has her keep a rifle), and disappears into the mountains.
The short story (which has made at least one Best Short Stories of the 20th Century list) ended it there, but Hollywood had to do its thing and have her run through the combat zone where Rat is telling the story. They wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on that superfluous ending.
The movie spent 2 hours telling a story that could have been told in 1 hour, yet it still muddled author Tim O'Brien's main theme: the telling of a story. The other theme, how women would react to a war, was explored pretty well. The casting was effective, though.
Just for everyone's information, here's the plot: "Rat", an infantryman in Vietnam, is telling a story to his squad mates, who think he's telling a tall tale at first, until he keeps laying out consistent details and candidly admits that he can't guarantee the parts of the story that he didn't witness himself.
Spoiler warning!
The story is about his old outfit, a MASH unit with no officers on top of a hill that they share with a Special Forces (Green Berets) team. One of the medics sneaks his girlfriend, Marianne, over from Cleveland via Braniff Airlines and USO shuttles. At first, it's like a little vacation, but as Marianne learns to tend the wounded, shoot an M-16, cook and speak Vietnamese, and hike and swim in the jungle, she goes through a spiritual transformation, "Vietnam makes me glow in the dark" "I can feel my blood moving". She tells her boyfriend, who thinks it's time to send her back, that this is the happiest she's ever been.
When she disappears for the night, her boyfriend assumes she's cheating on him, but learns that she has begun to accompany the Green Berets on ambushes. He lays down the law with her, but soon she goes out again with the Green Berets, but grows impatient even with them. She quits wearing boots and stops using a rifle (the movie version has her keep a rifle), and disappears into the mountains.
The short story (which has made at least one Best Short Stories of the 20th Century list) ended it there, but Hollywood had to do its thing and have her run through the combat zone where Rat is telling the story. They wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on that superfluous ending.