JACKNIFE (1989) *** Another tale from the brighter end of the dark underbelly of the American Dream. Now, the American Dream, it's real even if it isn't what it says it is, and even if it shows a different face to everyone who looks at it. The American Dream isn't bad, but it is only an opportunity for a part of what it is that everyone's really after. The American Dream has limitations that it won't confess. American filmmakers understand the tragedy of the Vietnam War, as comprehensively as anyone can who wasn't there, but even with four million graves the most horrible legacy of that war may be the potentially greater tragedy that American politicians refuse to understand what the tragedy was at its core. It wasn't the political loss on the ground. Robert De Niro knows something about it, we've all known that since The Deer Hunter, and what he knows is that there are too many pieces of the tragedy to ever tell. Like the 330 million gods of Hinduism, except all bad. So he works some more, rekindles the ashes, there's a morbid desperation in it all. Ed Harris is nearly as brilliant as the kind of guy who support groups were made for-not a weak guy, not a dumb guy, maybe a little bit unlucky, maybe looking the wrong way the wrong time, that kind of guy. David Jones knows how to shoot a lot of kinds of emptiness, and he changes gears as effortlessly as De Niro does in the big rig; veterans tale, sentimental romance in the mush, philosophical farce...I'm not saying that you don't notice the changes, but I'm saying that they're smooth and that every life is full of them. The romance is what should have ruined this thing, sunk it dead, trying to say too many things all at the same time without being able to do it, but Kathy Baker can. When she says she knows what she is, when De Niro says he "got pangs," the moments between them are meaningful, and offered with just the right touch. Several of the peripheral performances are just perfect: Elizabeth Franz, Charles Dutton, Walter Massey. The opening and closing musical numbers are also perfect, but some of the stuff in between is hopelessly sappy--with a different cast you might have even noticed.
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