War may be hell," one soldier says, "but peace is f*cking boring." Buffalo Soldiers, from Australian writer-director Gregor Jordan, is a darker, modern-day Catch-22, a black comedy/satire about American soldiers stationed in Stuttgart with "nothing to kill but time," just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In the words of BBC's Nev Pierce, "this is not a movie for George W. Bush." When the movie was screened on Sept. 8, 2001 at the Toronto Film Festival, audiences loved it. Miramax bought it on Sept. 10. Originally slated for release just after Sept. 11, Buffalo Soldiers was shelved indefinitely in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.
This is a film about soldiers who shoot heroin while they're supposed to be running tank drills, and steal American guns to trade for Turkish opium. Joaquin Phoenix is Ray Elwood, a slick, charismatic Gen-X version of Catch-22's Milo Minderbinder. Elwood is an army clerk who plays the black market, cooking opium into heroin and dealing everything from Mop-and-Glo to M-16s.
Everybody on the base, save for the naïve, bumbling Colonel Berman (Ed Harris, playing brilliantly against type), and the new, no-nonsense top sergeant Robert E. Lee (Scott Glenn), who knows that Elwood didn't finance his new Mercedes from army pay, seems to be part of the corruption. Elwood's Stuttgart base is suspended in a haze of corruption and opium fumes, where the lines of right and wrong and good and evil blur together into profit motive--or worse. This is not the stuff heroes are made of.
Two years after Sept. 11, in the ever-growing shadow of the Iraq debacle, audiences might finally be ready for something this edgy and critical. While its sub-genre is certainly not new--Catch-22, MAS*H, Apocalypse Now and Dr. Strangelove have all satirized the military--Buffalo Soldiers still hits closer to home today than it would have several years earlier.
Though the highly-trained, elite soldiers in the Middle East today are by no means Elwood and Co. circa the end of the Cold War, there is something fundamentally disturbing about seeing our troops turned drug dealers and racketeers. Despite the delays and the controversy surrounding Buffalo Soldiers, the well-executed if slightly overdone satire still carries far more weight today than its creators had likely envisioned.
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