A Bright Shining Lie

Bright Shining Lie Also Format:    Surround Sound Region Code:  1 Rating:   Original release date: 1998 Video/DVD Release Date: 12/22/1998 Bright Shining Lie

Adapted from Neil Sheehan's 1988 Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller, this $14-million TV docudrama, re-creating the Vietnam War with convincing combat footage, was the most expensive two-hour movie ever produced by HBO Pictures. Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann (Bill Paxton) spends ten years (1962-72) in Vietnam. When Vann exposes falsified casualty figures, deceptive battle reports, and other lies about the war, journalist Steven Burnett (Donal Logue) relays the truth to American newspapers, and Vann takes heat from higher-ups. Meanwhile, he's involved with a Vietnamese teacher (Vivian Wu), and his wife (Amy Madigan) is forced to lie so he won't be court-martialed for sexual relations with an underage Vietnamese girl. Back for a second tour, he gets another young Vietnamese woman pregnant and is forced to marry her. Returning in 1965 as a civilian, he's decorated and eventually promoted to general for his contributions during the Tet offensive. The music track features Grace Slick singing "Somebody to Love" while peasant villages are bombed. Filmed in Lompburi, Thailand. Premiered May 30, 1998 on HBO. Bhob Stewart

Director: Terry George; featuring Bill Paxton, Amy Madigan, Vivian Wu, Donal Logue, Eric Bogosian, Kurtwood Smith, Robert J. Burke, James Rebhorn, Ed Lauter, Harve Presnell, Pichariva A dramatization based on true events of LTC John Paul Vann and his work as a military and civilian advisor in Vietnam over a ten year period (1962-72). As a military advisor, Vann attempted to fight corruption in the Vietnamese army, recognizing the need to build trust among the Vietnamese peasantry. When his recommendations were ignored by the U.S. military, he exposed falsified battle reports and other deceptions to a New York Times reporter, effectively ending his military career. As the war escalated, however, Vann returned to Vietnam as a civilian advisor under Nixon's "Vietnamization" program, ending as the defacto commander of Vietnamese forces in the successful defense of the Central Highlands during the 1972 Easter Offensive. Based on the book by Neil Sheehan (Main Stack DS558.S471 1988; Moffitt DS558.S47 1988)Videocassette release of the May 30, 1998 television motion picture. 118 min.

In 1962, John Paul Vann (Bill Paxton) is a US Army officer who requests assignment as an official observer in Vietnam. While there, he witnesses the haphazard manner in which the South Vietnamese army conducts the campaign against Communist forces in the North. Vann attempts to convince military brass that winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese is the only way to victory, but his pleas fall on deaf ears. Vann resigns.

In his personal life, Vann cheats on his wife Mary Jane (Amy Madigan). Professionally, he works at a desk job, but he soon wants to journey back to Vietnam. He joins a civilian aid program, under the command of General Weyand (Ed Lauter), and assumes the role of US "civilian advisor" to the South Vietnamese army. Vann and partner Doug Elders (Eric Bogosian) quickly learn that providing aid to South Vietnamese villages means bribing their South Vietnamese allies. When Vann refuses to go along, his Asian staff members are butchered and his village home is base bombed.

Weyand expands Vann's role to that of military advisor--in this way, Vann soon becomes a "commanding general" in charge of ten divisions of South Vietnamese troops (although still technically a civilian). As his stature grows, Vann becomes obsessed with beating North Vietnam's brilliant General Jiapp, causing friends like Elders and reporter Steven Burnett (Donal Logue) to feel that Vann has "sold out" his idealistic stance. After a hollow ceremony in which Vann is honored for engineering an attack on Jiapp's forces that in truth went horribly wrong, Vann is killed in a helicopter crash.

Those familiar with Paxton only from his recent nice-guy turns in films like TWISTER (1996) and A SIMPLE PLAN (1998), will be surprised by his nuanced performance here as the hyper-macho Vann, a career military man who can no more stay away from battle than he can stay faithful to his wife. Other standout performances include Bogosian as the civilian advisor and Vivian Wu as the schoolteacher with whom Vann has an affair. Amy Madigan has little to do but fret in the role of Vann's long-suffering wife.

Though George does seem at times to almost evade the actual subject of the conflict in Vietnam, detailing instead Vann's bumpy career and troubled marriage, the film's strength is its choice of subject: Vann had a bird's-eye-view of the conflict in Vietnam, and in fact has been heralded in recent years as a strategist who proposed policies (including the "hearts and minds" factor) that many believe might have won the war--or at least have ended it sooner.

George, however, does bow to cliches at various points in the proceedings: at one point, Vann drunkenly walks past a brothel where a Vietnamese hooker greets him with, "I really, really like you, GI." Been there, done that in a dozen other movies, most notably PLATOON (1986) and FULL METAL JACKET (1987).

In attempting to make A BRIGHT SHINING LIE the last word on Vietnam (Vann witnesses several seminal events at which he wasn't present in real life), George denies himself the opportunity to create a wholly original war film, one that gets inside the head of one man who was important in waging it. (Graphic violence, adult situations, profanity.)  — Karl Williams

A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
Neil Sheehan

A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

Sheehan's tragic biography of John Paul Vann is also a sweeping history of America's seduction, entrapment and disillusionment in Vietnam.