Sons

Winner of a Northwest Film Festival award, this low-budget independent film tells the moving story of two Vietnam vets who struggle to come to terms with their sons. Tom (Tom Taylor) carves beautiful wood portraits with his one good arm, reflects on his experiences in Vietnam, and tries in vain to see his young son Lief who lives with his mother. Tom's friend, Bear (Steve Barbey) has an adolescent son, Matthew (Moses Perry), who shocks his father when he announces his intentions of joining the military. Shot on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, using veterans rather than actors, Sons succeeds because it has strong story values. We know that Tom's difficulties with his ex-wife may have their roots in Vietnam, but they take an understandable form which the audience can empathize with: Tom runs. Whenever things start to look too bright, Tom runs away to Mexico and tanks up because, as he says, "the posture of recovery is less painful than actual recovery." When the Bear and Matthew are visited by a recruiter while cutting wood, the Bear doesn't lecture the recruiter on the horrors of war--he takes his chainsaw to the recruiter's briefcase in wordless rage, and--as in real life, where heroic gestures of the unlawful kind don't go unnoticed--he lands his butt in jail. Sons is not a message movie, yet it telegraphs a whole host of insights and reflections loud and clear. "Rambo is a goddamn fantasy," says Tom, a cautionary note for our near future, as well as a much needed gloss on our recent past. Highly recommended. (R. Pitman)