Join a Discussion on Current Film
By JANET MASLIN
urder on a military base was once a good enough pretext for a detective thriller, but nowadays it takes more. The prevailing sleaze quotient calls for
kinks in a movie killing, and "The General's Daughter" is eager to oblige. So the title character is left worse than dead. She is found strangled, naked and spread-eagled, pinned by tent pegs in an exposed
outdoor setting. And the camera lets her lie there for repeated long shots as the investigation begins. Though the search for a culprit holds surprises, this isn't one of them: the movie thinks she asked for what
she got.
|
Paramount Pictures
|
So many secrets: Madeleine Stowe and John Travolta in Simon West's film "The General's Daughter."
|
"I wrote this novel partly as a result of the Persian Gulf war of January and February 1991," notes Nelson DeMille in an introduction to the blunt best seller on which this movie is based. The author, a Vietnam veteran, had been irked by how
"the media personalized the gulf war with endless interviews of women doing men's jobs," and in his book he expressed his view on the idea of women in the military: that it should be bombed back to the
Stone Age. So his story concerns the havoc wrought by an incredibly promiscuous female Army captain upon tough, disciplined men.
When it came to imagining a military investigator to unravel this case, DeMille wrote his camera-ready novel with Bruce Willis in mind. But on screen, "The General's Daughter" gets some much-needed mellowing
from the presence of John Travolta, whose Paul Brenner emerges as the voice of reason and the source of enough sardonic wisecracks to keep the audience engaged. Travolta again carries a film with enjoyable ease, even
if this one remains badly diminished by its perverse streak. The trouble with the story's fetishistic touches is that they're so lazy. They seem barely related to the characters, who are sketchy to begin with.
All we know about the general's daughter, played by Leslie Stefanson in a truly thankless role, comes from a scene in which she helps Paul Brenner change a tire.
"The General's Daughter" was directed by Simon West, known for a prize-winning Pepsi commercial at the 1995 Super Bowl and then "Con Air." Moving into the "Few Good Men" genre in which
familiar players stiffly feign military discipline, he once again shows a knack for underutilizing good actors while pumping up the story's gratuitously ugly side. The fact that Paul Brenner is first seen as an
undercover agent pretending to deal in illicit weapons isn't really reason enough for a houseboat shootout in which two men wind up overboard, struggling near a slashing outboard motor. The film's idea of
tact is to let this sequence culminate in a shot of reddening water and leave it at that.
|
|
|
ADVERTISEMENT
|
|
Next Brenner is called in to investigate the death of Capt. Elisabeth Campbell along with Sarah Sunhill, played by Madeleine Stowe as a sharp, appealing foil to Travolta's character. In a show of the narrative cleverness
so instrumental to much best-selling fiction, DeMille made this heroine both a rape expert with the army's Criminal Investigation Division and an old flame whom Brenner hasn't seen for a while. Together they
spar adroitly while sifting through the nasty particulars of the case. "What have we got here?" Brenner asks as he stumbles on a cache of pornographic videotapes. "Ten bucks says these are not the lost
'Honeymooners' episodes."
Suspects parade through the movie in a string of well-honed individual encounters, even though the question of who may or may not be guilty seems hardly to matter. Everyone has a motive, though West's way of lending
nuances to his characters doesn't go one step beyond that. At least the screenplay by Christopher Bertolini (previous credit: "Frozen Hippo Whiplash") and the Hollywood veteran William Goldman often has
enough smart, amusing banter to keep the interrogation scenes crackling. "Does that make me a killer?" asks James Woods as Col. Robert Moore, the most entertaining suspect in the bunch, as he admits to having
no alibi on the night in question. "No, it makes you lonely and unpopular," replies Travolta without missing a beat.
With James Cromwell as the dead woman's powerful, politically ambitious father, and a parade of other stiff-lipped principals in uniform (among them Clarence Williams 3d, Timothy Hutton, the director John Frankenheimer
and John Beasley in a memorable turn as an Army psychiatrist), "The General's Daughter" runs almost randomly through the crime investigation and its various leads. A character who did not die midway through
DeMille's book, for instance, is killed off here just for the sake of a bloody jolt. For all the stars' intensity as investigators, nobody in this whodunit really seems interested in the upshot. All the movie
cares about is the deed itself and the way it was done.
Rating: "The General's Daughter" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes grisly rape and other violence, frontal nudity, strong language and gleefully discussed forensic
details of a sex crime.
PRODUCTION NOTES
Directed by Simon West; written by Christopher Bertolini and William Goldman, based on the novel by Nelson DeMille; director of photography, Peter Menzies Jr.; edited by Glen Scantlebury; music by Carter Burwell; production
designer, Dennis Washington; produced by Mace Neufeld; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 118 minutes. This film is rated R.
Cast: John Travolta (Paul Brenner), Madeleine Stowe (Sarah Sunhill), James Cromwell (General Campbell), Timothy Hutton (Colonel Kent), Leslie Stefanson (Elisabeth Campbell), Clarence Williams 3d (Colonel Fowler), John Frankenheimer
(General Sonnenberg) John Beasley (Colonel Slesinger) and James Woods (Colonel Moore).