Post-Cold War Hollywood was rife with mid-budget dramas leaning into the contradictions of militarism in a world that moved past its old justifications for them. Some of these films live on to fill dead air on movie channels (A Few Good Men), others have been reclaimed as overlooked examples of artists at the height of their powers (Crimson Tide), and some, like Edward Zwick’s Courage Under Fire, have been left in the dustbins of secondhand store VHS collections.
Zwick is the anti-auteur of this type of film, a faceless presence behind the camera beyond his basic competence in composition and sequencing. If there’s a distinctive Zwick look, it’s that his films look exactly how you’d expect a 1990s Civil War movie or 2000s American samurai action film to look. Their designs are “typical” to the point of anonymity. Even more so than most of his works, Courage Under Fire takes steps to thematically reinforce his cinema’s nothingness by almost positing a question: what if the stories we want to believe aren’t true? Yet once this becomes the central conceit driving the narrative forward, Zwick’s film does everything to try to find that faithlessness to be false.
Courage Under Fire uses Denzel Washington’s reputation for stalwart heroes and nearly subverts it, by having his character, Col. Sterling, command an accidental friendly-fire incident during the film’s Gulf War-set opening. That action haunts him the rest of the picture during peacetime, when years later he’s sent by the Pentagon to investigate the heroics of Capt. Karen Walden (Meg Ryan) to possibly award her a posthumous Medal of Honor. Sterling finds holes in the stories of survivors, from the helicopter crew that she saved and from the one of her own downed chopper (the film’s script has them in the period-appropriate Blackhawks, although the film shoots with Hueys, leading to actors confusingly talk about the two different types of helicopters interchangeably). At first Walden seems to be a fearless warrior, and then is reframed as a terrified coward, before the ultimate truth—that she was betrayed by one of her own—comes out.
For a film highlighting the bureaucratic and overtly propagandistic nature of military PR, where conclusions are drawn before they’re investigated and the institution will pick whatever story best fits their own misguided self-perception, Courage Under Fire goes brazenly out of its way to ensure the audience that the stories of bravery and self-sacrifice are true.
There’s something perverse about the framing of a film as a “print the legend” story à la The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance only to have the plot resolve itself to say the legend was true all along and that’s why it should be celebrated. Like Liberty Valance, it’s not literally true: the films are fictional. Through that fiction, though, is a statement of values about American society, one which John Ford posits as built on a lie that he can’t but help love, whereas Zwick purports that even in seemingly cynical and unheroic times that valor is a true thing. Courage Under Fire’s stance, though, is a different kind of cynicism, one which deceptively uses a narrowed perspective polemically, arguing that war’s a stage for personal fulfillment. Even Sterling’s disgrace is redeemed by extending the sequence at the beginning beyond his friendly-fire incident to his battle-winning fight he mounted right afterwards. In beating his personal doubts, and because the film keeps its focus narrowly human to avoid the geopolitical, Sterling’s victory stands in as a victory against skepticism of the pointlessness of the Gulf War itself.
Contrast this with Ford’s even more myth-shattering Fort Apache, where we see Henry Fonda as a Custer-like cavalry leader who gets his men pointlessly slaughtered, but is ultimately upheld by the military as a hero. Even his foe within the regiment, the level-headed captain (John Wayne) who knows the country and its people, decides to eschew his embitterment to uphold a legend that serves the institution he loves. It is a lie, and they all know it, but it’s a lie that they need. Courage Under Fire, too, is a lie, but one that deceptively tries to say it’s not to uphold the status quo and argue that the naysayers are themselves self-serving cowards. At the end of it, Zwick’s film isn’t so much a cultural or institutional critique, but a fantasy about how the truth really is something simple and moral, a thing of comfort rather than something to be reckoned with.