Born on the Fourth of July.

Born on the Fourth of July * Another remarkable movie also features a hero in a wheelchair: Born on the Fourth of July, by Oliver Stone. I have been anything but a fan of this director, but the new film, an adaptation by him and Ron Kovic of the latter's autobiography, is a gripping, unrelenting but extremely powerful work, whose shortcomings evaporate from the memory, but whose strengths are indelible. Kovic comes from a Long Island blue-collar family, and grew up to be a typical American boy with inordinate faith in his country, his Catholic upbringing, and his family, especially Mom, whose sermons about Communist danger in Vietnam contributed to his enlisting in the Marines, leaving his girlfriend behind, and shipping off to Nam.

Scenes from Ron's childhood (the kids playing realistic war games, the little girlfriend full of love for Ron, the Fourth of July parade in Massapequa that coincidentally celebrates Ron's own birthday) artfully paint an American idyll that Norman Rockwell would have envied. But even here, there is a worm in the apple; in a somewhat later sequence, Ron loses a hi gh-school wrestling match and cries like a baby. And Tom Berenger, as a recruiter for the Marines, is too steelily perfect for comfort: if the Rock of Gibraltar came to life, he could out-wrestle it. Ron goes off to war directly from the prom where he and his girl (Kyra Sedgwick, insipidly sweet) chugalugged love's young dream.

The Vietnam sequences may be more frightening than anything in Platoon: the raid on a supposedly Cong-infested village that results in the butchering of civilians and a baby; the fighting in a cloud of confusion, during which Ron kills one of his buddies; Ron's Attempt to ease his conscience by confessing to an officer who insultingly brushes him off with a blanket absolution; Ron getting shot in the spine more palpably than I can recall experiencing in any film; the field hospital in which mass amputations are hallucinatorily performed by a few, overworked medics with little or no anaesthesia; and more, still more.

But for intimate horror nothing can surpass the scenes in the Bronx Veterans' Hospital: understaffed and rat-infested, the mostly black personnel shooting up behind not even locked doors, the antiquated equipment failing and nearly costing Ron one of his nonfunctional but still precious legs. Particularly shattering, however, are Ron's fanatical yet hopeless efforts to regain the use of his legs through maniacal exercise, and the utter frustration when it all fails. Even so, Ron returns to his family a still dedicated American and ex-Marine, although his mother almost can't face her paraplegic son and his father now seems more ineffectual than ever. And for understated social criticism, little can equal the Fourth of July parade at which Ron, riding in full regalia in a car, keeps saluting but twitches painfully each time a firecracker goes off.

Tom Cruise, to my surprise, is intense and searching as Ron, impressive as he slowly, ineluctably turns from clean-cut hawk into rebellious, hirsute hippie war protestor. And every scene involving Raymond J. Barry as the well-meaning, befuddled father, and Caroline Kava as the angry, punitive, forever uncomprehending mother, is beautifully acted and almost unbearably painful yet absolutely necessary. I can't think of another American movie in which gaping family rifts are portrayed with such unblinking, gritty honesty.

Bizarrely disturbing but also highly revealing are the sequencies in a paraplegic American expatriate colony somewhere in Mexico that involves the disgruntled, seedy Ron with an even more embittered fellow paraplegic, incisively played by Willem Dafoe, and a local prostitute who claims she can give him sexual satisfaction. The most searing scene has Cruise and Dafoe, having caught a cabbie trying to cheat them, dumped by him, wheelchairs and all, in a near-desert Mexican landscape, where they might easily have perished. How they fight, get overturned in their chairs, hurl impotent imprecations at each other--two tiny figures amid a starkly awe-inspiring nature--is fraught with nothing less than meta-physical significance.

Yet even this scene is dwarfed by Ron's trip down South to visit the exiguous family of the boy he shot and confess to them. This is one of those scenes in which a forgiveness that passes understanding breaks your heart: all that goodness in people going unrewarded, with no medals for the most self-lacerating candor, the almost superhuman gift of pardon. Love it or hate it, this is a film you cannot afford to pass by.