A Bright Shining Lie [DVD]

Bill Paxton plays John Paul Vann, a lieutenant colonel first assigned to Military Assistance Command Vietnam in 1962, and who later resigned under a cloud after telling anyone who'd listen, including the press, that the Army's top brass was botching the war - a bad career move if there ever was one. Later, he returns to Vietnam as a civilian and achieves de-facto 2-star rank as a Senior Advisor given virtual command of South Vietnamese troops opposing a North Vietnamese Army offensive before himself being killed in a helicopter crash.

Since A BRIGHT SHINING LIE came to me as a bonus DVD packaged with BAND OF BROTHERS, I thought it therefore might be rather cheesy. But, I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of this HBO original film release. Why, it was almost of Big Screen production quality.

Granted, when Paxton gets steely-eyed and juts his jaw aggressively, there's not the same heroic effect as displayed in WE WERE SOLDIERS (2002), but we all can't be Mel Gibson. However, the film effectively shows a man whose inner drive compels him to go to war, have the audacity to think he can win it single-handed, and cheat on his wife as a form of relaxation. One can almost see the testosterone sloshing back and forth.

For a small screen release, the combat scenes and special FX are quite good. As a peace statement, the producers went out of their way to include every infamous image of the era: the protesting Buddhist monk setting himself ablaze, the young Vietnamese girl running naked from her village that's just been bombed into an inferno, the captive Viet Cong being shot in the head by a South Vietnamese officer during the Tet Offensive. But, for all that, the anti-war message isn't overbearing because, thirty-some years later, the wrongness of the American presence in that quagmire is perhaps, in retrospect, a nationally accepted consensus.

A BRIGHT SHINING LIE does illustrate well, perhaps as a reminder to any superpower that wants to get involved in a Third World conflict, the pervasive local corruption that manipulates and the complete indifference, if not outright opposition, to an outside presence felt by the bulk of the populace. In that atmosphere, and under the stress to achieve some ill-conceived government definition of a win, even well intentioned and patriotic men such as Vann can be led astray by events and their own fervor.