Delayed Reaction: Hearts & Minds

Premise: A documentary with an unfavorable look at the Vietnam War.

 

I imagine Boomers look at the Iraq war protests in the mid-2000s and think "That's cute". I didn't live through the Vietnam War, but thanks in large part to the draft still being intact, it was a level of magnitude bigger than any of the military conflicts the U.S. has been involved in since. I've done what I can over the years to understand what that whole mess was about, but I'll never have the full context, no matter how many Ken Burns documentaries I watch. Hearts and Minds is an interesting historical artifact, because it's fresh off the end of the Vietnam War. It exists in the small window between the end of Vietnam and Nixon's resignation*. When this was completed in 1974, it still looked like Vietnam would be the biggest event of the decade.

 

*The Watergate scandal was still going on, but this was completed before it was clear that he would resign.

 

Hearts & Minds isn't exactly fair and balanced. It is very anti-war. It is thoroughly one-sided though. It covers all the things that are bad about the war. The lying politicians. The negative effects on the soldiers who served. The destruction it wrought upon the Vietnamese population. The ineffectiveness of it all. This doesn't answer the questions "What was the Vietnam war about?" but it sure answers "Why were people angry about the Vietnam War?" This is a raw movie. No one involved has really had time to digest it all. And, unlike a Fahrenheit 9/11, the filmmakers don't make themselves the story. It's a deeply upsetting movie. Much of the footage taken in Vietnam is horrifying. It's insane to me how much footage of the death and destruction going on there was on the news at the same time that George Carlin was getting in trouble for the "seven dirty words".

 

The main critique I'd have of this movie is baked into the premise: it's not balanced. This is clear anti-Vietnam propaganda. I think over time, its proven to mostly be on the right side of history, but no one could mistake this for an earnest attempt to understand the Vietnam War. The filmmakers went in to make a movie about how awful the Vietnam War was. I don't find that kind of documentary filmmaking as interesting, but Hearts & Minds is effective at what it's trying to do.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend