, ARTS The Michigan Doily Thursday, January 11, 1990 Page 7 A hirsute Tom Cruise (right) stars, and even does a respectable job, as Vietnam vet and eventual anti-war activist Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July, Oliver Stone's followup to Platoon.Willem Dafoe puts in a brief but memorable appearance. Marine tells it to the world Reinventing Shakespeare by Gary Taylor Weidenfeld and Nicolson, $29.95 hardcover Cultural historians tell us that when Athens was at war with Sparta in the fifth century B.C. the city's generals countenanced, even financed and attended, productions of plays by Aristophanes in which they were brutally mocked. The historians take this for a demonstration of the won- derful liberality of the first democ- racy, but I have always worried that the story had more to say about the impotence of art. So when Gary Taylor writes that a history of Shakespeare is "really a history of four centuries of our cul- ture," I am doubtful. That Shake- speare has fed and shaped English like nothing except the King James Bible, I acknowledge, but how has he affected people's lives? For good or bad? It's a question Taylor doesn't ask enough or ever answer. In Ren- venting Shakespeare he runs through a list of crucial perfor- mances and editions and attempts to account for changing tastes along the way; at the close, though, one is left only with an impression of how English speakers have fed and shaped Shakespeare. "The language of poetry," Taylor quotes from the critic William Ha- zlitt, "naturally falls in with the lan- guage of power." Hazlitt meant that poetry, like good rhetoric, is high- sounding and memorable, and that politicians profit by taking their cue from poetry. A long view of the treatment of Shakespeare through the years shows the deeper truth of Ha- zlitt's words. What is remarkable about Shake- speare is his hold on the top. Since he was brought back to the stage during the Restoration, Taylor records, he has survived Protestant prudery, Enlightenment emenda- tions, Romantic hero-worship, Vic- torian dissection, on down to the present historicizing movement (of which Taylor considers himself a leader), with his reputation reaf- firmed and enhanced at each turn. Shakespeare has fallen in with every crowd, or at least with every crowd that has made its way to power. Kings could point to Shakespeare as authority for their sovereign right. Edmund Burke thought he illustrated the danger of defiance and used him as a bulwark against the French Revolution spreading to England. In the time of the British raj in India, Parliament decided to put Shake- speare on civil service exams - he became a prerequisite for administer- ing imperialism. Today, superstar literary theorist Terry Eagleton finds it "difficult to read Shakespeare without feeling that he was almost certainly familiar with the writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Derrida." In a strange twist of Hamlet's ar- gument that "the purpose of playing. . . was and is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature," successive ages have held Shakespeare up as a flatter- ing reflection of themselves. Shake- speare is taught today b) thousands of liberal arts professors who claim he poses eternal questions and in- duces edifying self-crit ism, yet the record presented in :einventing Shakespeare suggests that no one has ever learned from Shakespeare, only manhandled him. Surely the plays are by now too encrusted with centuries of dominant-culture values to be read unbesmirched in the un- dergraduate classroom. Hamlet hoped "to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure" with the play. Hamlet's lines, I believe, come as close as anything to revealing Shakespeare's aspirations for his own art. Taylor's book shows how he has been failed. -Greg Rowe Born on the Fourth of July dir. Oliver Stone BY ALYSSA KATZ It's not just another Vietnam magnum opus - after all, it was di- rected and co-written by the tell-it- like-it-is war vet Oliver Stone - but Born on the Fourth of July comes so close to being an outstand- ing film and ultimately misses the mark. It's a sequel of sorts to Stone's Platoon, depicting the expe- rience of a Marine coming home, de- feated, from the front. He's using re- ally powerful material: Ron Kovic's autobiographical account, the story of an eager, patriotic young man who becomes an anti-war activist after becoming paralyzed in battle and returning to an often hostile America. As the wheelchair-bound Kovic, Tom Cruise is almost always on- screen, trying very hard to ditch his cute/vapid image. He succeeds for + the most part, a feat for which he should be given a good amount of credit - although the meaty, blood, sweat, and tears nature of the role surely gave him a lot to work with. Subtlety is not his forte, although Stone is fond of presenting him in super close-up, video-ready shots. Platoon alum Willem Dafoe puts in a notable and scruffy turn as Charlie, a drunken, paralyzed vet who sticks around a veteran's resort in Mexico because he refuses to deal with a country that doesn't want him back. There's a lot of powerful film- making to be found here, but it is often presented against a drippy backdrop. Early on, the Kovic fam- ily clusters around the TV, listening to Kennedy's "what you can do for your country" speech, when Kovic mere tells little Ronnie that she had a dream, that someday, he'll be speaking to millions of people. Sure enough, Ron does do this at the end of the film, as a heckler at the '72 Republican convention and a guest of honor for the Democrats in '76. But do we really need a flashback to the earlier scene, not to mention the overwhelmingly surging John Williams score? Moving, well-made scenes keep getting bogged down by such simplistically manipulative sentimentality. Another crucial flaw lies in the depiction of Kovic's transformation from "love it or leave it" hawk to peace crusader. It feels as if, faced with the film's already two-and-a- half-hour running time, Stone (or scissor-happy Universal Pictures) left something out. All that we actu- ally get to know is that Kovic found his killing of women, children and a member of his squadron abhorrent; the explanation of his change of sen- timent doesn't get much more com- plex than that. Stone is excellent when it comes to hard-hitting realism. The Vietnam scenes play powerfully, thanks in large part to frantic hand-held camer- See BORN, page 9 Michigan Alumni work here: The Wall Street Journal The New York Times The Washington Post The Detroit Free Press The Detroit News NBC Sports Associated Press United Press International Scientific American Time Newsweek Sports Illustrated Because they worked here: If you liked our other print & poster sales You'll LOVE this sale 'UFFALOES, TIGERS, RAZORBACKS, JAYHAWKS, MUSTANGS, COUGARS, OWLS, RAMS, WILDCATS, BADGERS, LONGHORNS, LIONS, BOBCATS AND OTHER ASSORTED WILDLIFE GATHER HERE ANNUALLY January11 - 13 Thursday - Saturday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. Michigan Union Ground Floor Mall LAST 3 DAYSI Best Selection! Best Prices! Best college Poster Sale anywhere! We invite you to see for yourself. When mid-terms are one for the books and the call of the wild beckons, chart a course to South Padre Island this spring break. 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