Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (1987) 85/100 - For the last few days, I've been watching a channel on YouTube which has a collection of the old Siskel & Ebert shows from the late 70's through the 2000's. During one episode they were showcasing what they picked as the year's best films. The year was 1988 and one of Roger's picks was a documentary I had never heard of, but his description and Gene's agreement had me doing an immediate Google search. I found it on Vimeo and they're both right, it's one of the best documentaries I've watched about Vietnam. Using actual letters written by soldiers who were on their tour of duty and being read by an array of actors & actresses, for the first time you can put a face to the war. As this film was progressing, I time warped back to the late sixties and memories of family & friends who served in the war washed over me. Both of my mother's brothers served and were lucky to come home alive. But two kids who I would become friends with in mid-1968 had their older brother taken from their family in spring of 1967. We played baseball on a little league field right across the street from their house and the city placed a memorial plaque at the base of the flagpole on the other side of the centerfield fence. After all these years I still remembered his name from looking at that plaque on almost a daily basis. After the film was over, I went on the Vietnam Memorial Wall website and found him and there was a picture of him. I had never met him, he was just a name on a memorial stone to me. But now, after watching this powerful documentary, I was able to finally see what he looked like. And damn, did he ever look like his youngest brother!
I highly recommend this documentary, but be ready to shed some tears, especially when the last letter is read. Ellen Burstyn reads a letter from a mother who has visited the wall 15 years after the war has ended and found her son's name. The letter she wrote was a cathartic purging of the pain she felt when she found out many years earlier that the little boy she gave birth to, had died. It's a gut wrenching moment that had me sobbing like a baby, yet was a perfect way to end the film. Throughout the film, we hear the letters from disheartened and frightened young men. Her's is the only letter written by a non-combatant and when she laments the suffering her boy went through as he lay dying, it rips your heart out. The only reason that I don't give this film a perfect score is that it does for a few moments, fall into using the usual tropes of war documentaries. Exposition of current events interlaced with sixties music which has become cliché in war documentaries. Had the director shown restraint in this regard and added more letters, I would have given it a perfect score. Please check this film out...
https://vimeo.com/444983069