Another bad mistake is that Martini’s character is presented as near-saintlike, with a powerful charisma that draws just about everyone to him.Įvery once in a while there is a bright spot, most notably a scene with Gary Sinise as a sympathetic bartender and JoBeth Williams as a fragile barfly. The encounters along the way with other veterans and people from his past and a possible new romantic interest take up most of the story. Will does not like that, and so he steals the boss’ new motorcycle and goes off on a journey across country. The boss points out that he did not need to do that when he was supposed to be working. Will says the VA doctor told him he needed to do that. The boss says no because Will took time away from the job to do pull-ups and read. We then get some flashbacks of Will and his unit under fire as in present day he is rousted from the house where he’s been squatting, and then we see him arguing with his employer ( Robert Patrick) over back pay. And it’s not just any poem but “The Road Not Taken” (“I shall be telling this with a sigh…”) followed by the prayer attributed to Sir Francis Drake (“Disturb us, Lord, when we are too pleased with ourselves…”). The first five minutes feature the title character (Martini) sitting on a beach as we hear him intone poetry in voiceover. If we had been writing screenplays, I am certain she would have added, “And please, please, do not have your characters recite a poem.” It was not that this scene could never work, she explained, but she was confident that no matter how talented and sensitive each of us was, we did not have what it took to carry it off. My high school creative writing teacher made us all promise that we would never write a story that began with a character pondering the meaning of life on the beach.
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