Editor’s Note: After a few years working remotely, Nick Johnston is back in Canada all week covering the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. We’re all very excited! Read through our continuing coverage of TIFF 2022, check out our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of this year and past festivals.
There’s a scene midway through Elegance Bratton’s swell marine drama The Inspection that ranks up there with the best filmmaker call-outs of the decade, in which Bokeem Woodbine’s commander, a vet of the first Gulf War, decides to treat his recruits to a little Christmas screening. “This is what the shit was like,” he tells them as he presses play on a VHS copy of Sam Mendes’s Jarhead, a movie that made a splash in 2004 but was steadily crushed under the weight of its own irrelevance. But much like Jake Gyllenhaal and company got their rocks off watching Apocalypse Now in that film, the testosterone-fueled Marines-in-the-Making hoot and holler along with the movie, though their enthusiasm isn’t over any “Ride of the Valkyries” style moment of easily-misread badassery (and it’s not like Jarhead offers any), but rather at a moment in which a cadet discovers that a video tape he’d received from his wife in the mail has been recorded over with the evidence of her affair with his neighbor. Everyone reacts as you’d might expect in the midst of a hyper-masculine environment like Boot Camp, but one cadet, French (Jeremy Pope), isn’t participating in the joviality.
See, French is gay, and he’s turned to the Marines as a sort of Hail Mary pass to give his life meaning after spending the last decade or so on the New Jersey streets. His mom (Gabrielle Union), a prison guard who had dreams of her own before she was saddled with raising a son, hates the facts of her son’s life, and essentially disowned him when he was 16. Three hots and a cot and God and Country and making some meaning out of his existence are only partially the reason he made his way to the Marines — he wants to prove to his mother that he can be all he can be, even in an organization that seems diametrically opposed to having someone like him in the ranks. It’s still the heyday of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and even with that meager amount of protection, boot camp is a hellish place for a queer individual. He’s savagely beaten by some of his fellow recruits after getting an involuntary erection in a group shower, and encounters prejudices both large (institutional discrimination, Woodbine’s bullying) and small (odd looks, insults) over the course of his time in the camp. But he perseveres, and finds some amount of brotherhood with the men who will eventually, perhaps, fight and die alongside of him as fellow Marines.
There’s been enough criticism about the formulaic nature of The Inspection tossed about in the past few days, but I genuinely think that misses the point. Boot camp, for the most part, is designed to be a semi-universal experience, given that the goal is to break down men and make them into Marines: if there’s any formula inherent to this “genre,” it’s because it is intentionally designed that way as a function. Gomer Pyle in Full Metal Jacket is the exception to the rule, and with how estranged society is from the institution of the Military at large – it’s mostly men and women from French’s background, but of different orientations and specific circumstances, that find themselves in the service — I’d argue that making movies rooted in the personal experience of a generalized and rigid process like Basic Training is a good thing. Bratton’s experience as a gay man in the Corps is what makes the film so much more interesting than it could be, and the reason I refer to the Mendes bit as a call-out is because the only person in the Jarhead production who happened to be involved in the Gulf War was the author of the book: It is, in essence, saying that there are specific details about the trials and travails of that three-month period that can only have come from living through it. There’s a real rawness to the entire production, with Pope’s performance being a key highlight: he endures the slings and arrows of casual cruelty in unexpected ways, refusing to let prejudice snuff out what little light he has left after a lifetime moving from one struggle to the next.
Even worse, perhaps, is the suggestion that this is somehow pro-Corps propaganda, which is dumb, given all of the officer-sanctioned misery heaped upon French as mentioned above, but I can see how the film’s conclusion might lead some to view it in that light. But I see it more charitably, given Bratton’s background, a sad statement of fact that, once one makes it through The Shit, and earns their assignments and puts on that dress uniform, a Marine is a Marine, and that you ultimately don’t care if the man to your right is black or white or gay or whatever when hellfire is raining down upon you both. There is a meritocratic point in which the glass ceiling can be shattered, even if it is accompanied by bullshit subterfuge, but that same point is incredibly elusive and perhaps even impossible to find when it comes to changing the hearts and minds of one’s own family. And this withering conclusion — that for all of its toxicity, the Marine Corps can ultimately accept someone more easily than their own mother can — is the hardest truth that Bratton has in store for us, the kind of clear-eyed reflection common in filmmakers who suffered through massive conflicts on their own, be it William Wyler or George Stevens or whomever. “Write what you know” is an overused axiom used to silence the ambitions of would-be artists everywhere, but when it comes to adding new perspectives to a sort of universally-understood-by-media-osmosis experience like boot camp, Bratton has done us a service by adding the color of his past to the patchwork quilt of war stories.