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Biloxi Blues (1988)

Posted By: Efgrapha

Date: 5 Dec 2014 18:12:48

Biloxi Blues was the second of playwright Neil Simon's semi-autobiographical trilogy (number one was Brighton Beach Memoirs; number three, Broadway Bound). Matthew Broderick stars as Simon's alter ego Eugene Morris Jerome, who is drafted and shipped off to boot camp in Biloxi, Mississippi in the waning days of World War II. Eugene is at the mercy of near-psychotic drill sergeant Toomey (Christopher Walken), who seems to have a personal vendetta against the poor schlemiel (Toomey also has all the film's best lines). While sweating out basic training, Eugene is indoctrinated into manhood by local prostitute Rowena (Park Overall). The film version of Biloxi Blues retains the wit and poignancy of the theatrical original–except towards the end, which pointlessly emphasizes a showdown between Eugene and Toomey.

Synopsis by Hal Erickson, Allmovie.com

LEAD: WHEN first seen in "Biloxi Blues," the movie, Eugene Morris Jerome is not, technically speaking, actually seen. He's an indistinct figure in the window of a World War II troop train. With more purpose than hurry, the train chugs across a broad, verdant American landscape, shimmering in the golden light of memory, as well as in the kind of humid, midsummer heat in which even leaves sweat.

WHEN first seen in "Biloxi Blues," the movie, Eugene Morris Jerome is not, technically speaking, actually seen. He's an indistinct figure in the window of a World War II troop train. With more purpose than hurry, the train chugs across a broad, verdant American landscape, shimmering in the golden light of memory, as well as in the kind of humid, midsummer heat in which even leaves sweat. On the soundtrack: "How High the Moon."

In one unbroken movement, the camera swoops down and across time and landscape into a close-up of the ever-observant Eugene. He's headed for Biloxi, Miss., and basic training in the company of other recruits who, to his Brighton Beach sensibility, seem to have been born and bred under rocks.

They are Wykowski, Selridge, Carney and Epstein, the usual American cross-section. They're an exhausted but still tirelessly obscene crew given to communication by insults - rudely frank comments about each other's origins, intelligence, odors and anatomies. Says the voice of Eugene (Matthew Broderick), who has a would-be writer's way of stepping outside events to consider his own reactions to them: "It was hard to believe these were guys with mothers and fathers who worried about them. It was my fourth day in the Army, and I hated everybody so far."

It now seems as if the entire Broadway run of Neil Simon's 1985-86 hit play was simply the out-of-town tryout for the movie, which opens today at the Baronet and other theaters. However it came to be, "Biloxi Blues," carefully adapted and reshaped by Mr. Simon, is a very classy movie, directed and toned up by Mike Nichols so there's not an ounce of fat in it.

Here is one adaptation of a stage piece that has no identity crisis. "Biloxi Blues" is not a movie that can't quite cut itself loose from the past, and never for a minute does it aspire to be anything but a first-rate service comedy. With superb performances by Mr. Broderick, who created the role of Eugene on Broadway, and Christopher Walken, who plays Mr. Simon's nearly unhinged, very funny variation on the drill sergeant of movie myth, "Biloxi Blues" has a fully satisfying life of its own.

In one brief but key sequence, the camera watches Eugene and his buddies as they watch the Abbott and Costello classic "Buck Privates." The beautifully timed, low-comedy scene that so delights them continues to be funny in itself. It also helps to place "Biloxi Blues" in a very dif-ferent movie-reality, in an Army that's racially segregated and in which ignorance and bigotry are the order, though, in hindsight, World War II remains the last "good war."

"Biloxi Blues" is about the education of Eugene Morris Jerome, who has three goals in life: to become a writer, to lose his virginity and to fall in love. Even if, through some warp in time, we'd never before heard of Neil Simon, the existence of this first-person memoir would reveal how Eugene succeeded in his chosen craft. "Biloxi Blues" recalls how he made out in the sex and romance departments while also growing up.

It makes no difference that there's never any doubt that he will make out. That's a given. The pleasure comes in witnessing Mr. Simon and Mr. Nichols as they discover surprises in situations that one might have thought beyond comic salvation.

Beginning with young Richard, the lovesick poet in Eugene O'Neill's "Ah, Wilderness!," would-be writer-characters in the American theater have been sneaking off to brothels virtually nonstop. However, not one of those earlier adventures equals the nuttiness of Eugene's with a Biloxi woman (Park Overall) who, on the side, deals in perfume, stockings, black lace panties and other items hard to find in a wartime economy. Says Eugene, "Do you sell men's clothing?"

There is also an idealized funniness in Eugene's sweet, tentative romance with a pretty Catholic girl (Penelope Ann Miller), who sends his head (and the camera) spinning. When she tells him that her name is Daisy, the delighted Eugene says that Daisy is the name of his favorite female character in fiction. Responds this no-nonsense Daisy, "Which one, Daisy Buchanan or Daisy Miller?"

Even more important are Eugene's relations with the other recruits, including the slobbish but pragmatic Wykowski (Matt Mulhern) and Selridge (Markus Flanagan), and especially Epstein, played by Corey Parker with seriously funny arrogance. Epstein is a young, bookish fellow with a delicate stomach and utter disdain for what people think.

Epstein serves as Eugene's conscience, but Eugene still can't bring himself to stand up for a fellow Jew: "Epstein sort of sometimes asked for it, but since the guys didn't pick on me that much, I just figured I'd stay neutral, like Switzerland."

Eugene's coming of age is sharpened in the film by having Eugene, rather than Epstein, become the key figure in the recruits' late-night showdown with the crazy Sergeant Toomey.

As Sergeant Toomey ("You're not fighting men yet, but I'd put any one of you up against a Nazi cocktail waitress"), Mr. Walken gets his best role in a very long time, possibly since "Pennies From Heaven." Mr. Broderick is wonderfully devious as a young man who's so taken by life's spectacle that he sometimes forgets he's a part of it.

As if he believed that a wisecrack left unspoken were a treasure lost forever, Eugene won't keep quiet. This is an endearing characteristic in Eugene but a problem in some of Mr. Simon's other works. "Biloxi Blues" is different. Mr. Nichols keeps the comedy small, precise and spare. Further, the humor is never flattened by the complex logistics of movie making, nor inflated to justify them.

"Biloxi Blues" is the second play in Mr. Simon's "Eugene trilogy," which begins with "Brighton Beach Memoirs" and ends with "Broadway Bound." It may not be as good a play as "Broadway Bound" but, with "The Heartbreak Kid," adapted from a Bruce Jay Friedman story, and "The Sunshine Boys," it stands as one of the three best films Mr. Simon has yet written.

Review by Vincent Canby, New York Times

IMDB 6,6/10 from 11 152 users

Wiki

Director: Mike Nichols

Writer: Neil Simon (screenplay & play)

Cast: Matthew Broderick, Christopher Walken, Michael Dolan, Markus Flanagan, Matt Mulhern
Corey Parker, Casey Siemaszko, Penelope Ann Miller, Park Overall and other