Hart's War: The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

Bruce Willis has been getting by on his squinty-face for years. For the most part, he's done all right with it, daring evildoers to cross him, affecting tenderness, even cuddling up to cute and/or traumatized kids. But in Hart's War, the squinty-face isn't as effective as it has been in the past. As the primary technique by which his character, Col. William McNamara, is attempting to survive his time in a World War II POW camp, the squinty-face appears to be a means to intimidate both the U.S. soldiers he oversees and their German captors. But it's not long before you begin to think that maybe the squinty-face ("Yipee-yi-yay, motherfucker!") isn't the best way to get all this done.

Still, Willis's presence in Hart's War does help to mitigate (for a minute, anyway) its part in the ongoing WWII-nostalgia pile-on. Willis's ability to play an asshole -- especially a sympathetic asshole -- as well as anyone, makes the movie's clunk-on-the-head moralizing slightly more bearable. Very slightly.

Perhaps it's not entirely his fault, as this moralizing comes at him (and you) from multiple directions at once. As if the Nazis aren't enough to deal with in a POW camp, there's also a crew of U.S. racists, incited to movie-sized action when a couple of black Tuskegee airmen, Lt. Lincoln Scott (Terrence Howard) and Lt. Lamar Archer (Vicellous Shannon), are also taken prisoner.

Dealing with U.S. racism at this time is actually a good idea, given that so many recent WWII films either leave out this detail or insert heroic black characters as preemptive measures, not addressing the military, legal and social systems that made their lives hell (see Pearl Harbor). But Hart's War ends up doing what so many films about historical racism do -- it turns it into a learning curve for the white characters, specifically, McNamara and one Lt. Hart (Colin Ferrell), the very Hart who bears the film's metaphorically weighty title.

Predictably, Hart's war ends up being his education, his route to noble manhood. He absorbs his lesson so completely that by film's end, he comes up with a voice-over equating his understanding of words like "honor" and "courage" and "duty" with that of a young black man living in the United States circa 1945. Uh, pretty to think so.

The whiteness of the film permeates even its surface: It opens on the snowy mountains of Belgium, where, within minutes, Hart is captured by some wearing white camouflage. Here begins Hart's narrative dual function as victim and blank slate, lacking in insight and intuition. You see brief, not-so-coherent scenes where he's brutally interrogated, then poof!, he's loaded on a train to Stalag VI.

Though the train sequence is warm-up for the central conflict between Hart and McNamara at the camp, it does establish, briefly, two things: First, the dark, unstable, wet, creepy setting, essentially a morgue on wheels, makes quite clear the real horrors of this "educational" experience (for, once Hart arrives at Stalag IV, he has it relatively easy, with a bunk, food and space to breathe). And second, it shows that Hart is weak (read: human), afraid, near death and in need of aid from his fellow prisoners, most of whom are enlisted men.

This distinction of rank is a crucial one, as becomes immediately clear when Hart gets to Stalag VI and McNamara sends him to bunk not with the officers, but in a barracks full of enlisted men. McNamara pretends this isn't a dis, and Hart is seemingly naïve enough to believe that it's really because there's no room in the officers' quarters. (But if you're paying attention, you'll see the squinty-face that comes just as McNamara makes the assignment.) Though this might seem malicious (which it is), since Hart to this point is basically harmless, you only have to wait a second or two before the movie shows you Hart's flashback to the interrogation, a big fat ka-chunk of a clue as to McNamara's motivation.