Brian De Palma is a man of contradictions. The director is known for filming spectacular scenes of violence: Just think of the elevator slashing in "Dressed To Kill," Al Capone's baseball bat in "The Untouchables" or pretty much all of "Scarface." Yet his riskiest and maybe best film, 1989's "Casualties of War," looked at an unspeakable act of violence — the wartime rape and murder of a Vietnamese civilian by U.S. soldiers — and brimmed with moral outrage.
Jingoists — and there were plenty of them after eight years of Ronald Reagan — couldn't get past the fact that "Casualties" depicted U.S. troops committing a war crime, and they attacked the film as simply more liberal America-bashing, as if ignoring war crimes is the patriotic thing to do. (Wasn't that what the "good Germans" did during the Third Reich?)
But this view willfully ignored what De Palma was trying to portray; "Casualties" was a detailed look at the pressures of survival in a guerrilla war, how war's brutality can lead a man to nihilism, and the great moral strength needed to resist that. Sean Penn's raging, out-of-control sergeant, Michael J. Fox's ineffectual nice guy, and Thuy Tu Le's brave performance as the terrorized victim made "Casualties" an unforgettably painful portrait of war's dehumanizing effects.