Heaven and Earth

Oliver Stone is an extremely impor­tant filmmaker. We know, because he keeps telling us so. Because he's such a major master of moviedom, he gets to make long films stuffed full of big, serious statements. In Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, Stone brilliantly argued that war is hell. In JFK, he convinced us that Kennedy is dead. With Heaven and Earth, Ollie returns to the battlefield.

Heaven and Earth is Stone's latest install­ment in his Vietnam lecture series. This time, however, he's telling us the Viet­namese side of the story. And from a woman's viewpoint, too. (Of course, this is from a director whose pomposity is equaled only by his chauvinism. But why complain? He cracked the Kennedy case, didn't he?)

In its favor, Heaven and Earth has the memoirs of Le Ly Hayslip (played by new­comer Hiep Thi Le), on which the story is based. Having survived the horrors and degrada­tions of the war, she's provided Americans with several accessible accounts of the expe­rience. In fact, you may want to read her books — they make more sense than the movie.

Presented in Stone's typical sledgeham­mer fashion, Le Ly's story becomes a numb­ing series of B-movie atrocities. Within the first 90 minutes of this long ride, her village is torched by the French, seized by the Viet Cong and finally leveled by the U.S. Army. Meanwhile, Le Ly is tortured by the South Vietnamese, raped by the VC and prostituted by the Americans. And it all happens so fast that she doesn't even have time to catch her breath.

Then she meets Tommy Lee Jones, the nice Marine who wants to marry her. He whisks her off to San Diego, where they live with his mommy (Debbie Reynolds). There, Le Ly discovers supermarkets, color TV and "Vietnam Vet" syndrome —Jones turns out to be a ticking time bomb of delayed stress.

In the hands of a better filmmaker, Heav­en and Earth might have been a powerful movie. But Stone is so busy beating the audience over the head with every obvious point that the story loses its emotional impact. What's more, the movie's chronolo­gy has a jagged feel to it, as if huge chunks of scenes were lopped out in a final edit. After a while, it's difficult to even keep track of which war is being fought.

But maybe you should see Heaven and Earth anyway. You never know — Prof. Stone may hit us up with a pop quiz.