CityVida

January 20, 2012, 9:00am CST (“Red Tails”: a Story that Needs To Be Told…Just Not This Way) I somehow missed the announcement that December and January had been declared “melodramatically over-the-top war movies” season. Let’s see. Last month saw the release of Steven Spielberg’s World War I-set film about a boy and his horse, “War Horse.” That was followed by the limited release of Zhang Yimou’s “The Flowers of War,” the “Rape of Nanking” set tale of a gold-hearted American and the equally sweet group of Chinese prostitutes who save a group of young Catholic Chinese girls from the evil hands of depraved Japanese soldiers (released this week in Chicago). And now, we have the cliché-ridden story of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen in the George Lucas-produced “Red Tails.”

There is no doubt that the story of the Tuskegee Airmen is one that needs to be told over and over, one that, given the advances in digital and special effects technology, can make for a rousing and exciting movie. It is, indeed, a story that has been better told in a 1995 HBO movie starring Laurence Fishburne, Mekhi Phifer and Cuba Gooding, Jr. and in a 2002 PBS documentary narrated by Ossie Davis. It possesses all the right dramatic elements: the Tuskegee Airmen was an all African American World War Two pursuit squadron established to prove, once and for all, that African Americans had the resilience, talent and courage to serve their country in times of war. Over 500 of them saw combat; any one of their stories would make a great movie. “Red Tails,” alas, is not one of them.

In a recent New York Times profile, Lucas acknowledged that he sought inspiration for “Red Tails” in such classic World War Two films as “Flying Leathernecks” starring John Wayne, that he wanted to make a film as naively idealistic and patriotic as those. Nothing wrong with that, except that in the hands of scriptwriters John Ridley and Aaron McGruder (author of the comic strip “The Boondocks”) and director Anthony Hemingway, the execution is anachronistically laughable. All the characters have nicknames that immediately telegraph their personalities: Joe “Lighting” Little (David Oyelowo) is a reckless, gung-ho pilot who loves to take chances; Marty “Easy” Julian (Nate Parker) is the by-the-book pilot with drinking issues; Roy “Junior” Gannon (Tristan Wilds) is the youngest member of the squadron and so on and so forth.

Sick and tired of going out on strafing missions over the Italian countryside in their clunky planes, the men of the 332 Fighter Group are eager to see some real action and they let their commanding officer (Cuba Gooding Jr. in full General MacArthur pipe-chewing mode) know in no uncertain terms. At the same time, Colonel A.J. Bullard (Terrence Howard) is in Washington D.C. knocking some racist Pentagon heads and securing an honest to goodness mission for his men: to protect the Air Force’s gigantic bomber planes from the Nazi’s more nimble fighters. And so, between CGI dogfights (shot as if they belonged in “Battlestar Galactica”), inspirational speeches that seemed to have been written by Deepak Chopra or Tony Robbins and their own personal struggles, these men prove their bravery, winning over many a racist skeptic.

Of course, what would a World War Two drama be like without a good old love story, in this case between Lighting and the beautiful Italian country girl Sofia (Daniela Ruah)? You know we are on Fantasy Island when a romance between an African American and a white Italian woman in fascist Italy raises nary an eyebrow among the all-white villagers.

Lucas may have had the best of intentions in wanting to bring the stories of these men to the big screen. But his highly idealized, simplistic vision, trivializes their tale. Full of wooden, mind-struckingly dumb dialogue and cartoonish characters, the film offers a sanitized view of war that is out of synch even with Spielberg’s and Zhang’s visions in their flawed but slightly better films. And Lucas’ claim that no studio would touch a war film with a mostly African American cast also ignores facts. How does he account, then, for Spike Lee’s “Miracle at St. Anna” about, get this, the contributions African American made to the war effort? History is not as black and white as Lucas would like it to be.

Alejandro A. Riera writes about culture (Latino and non-Latino alike) in his blog culturebodega.wordpress.com

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