Oliver Stone in his appointed role -- self-appointed, make that -- of dispenser of strong medicine. His patented technique: put the patient in a headlock and pinch his nose with one hand, then force a funnel down his throat and pour in castor oil with the other. That's a pretty rough description, but it's a pretty rough technique, too. To round out a "Vietnam trilogy" (first Platoon, then Born on the Fourth of July, now this) with a story told from the point of view of a Vietnamese native, a peasant girl uprooted by the winds of war and cast hither and yon by them, is certainly a viable idea (viable in tenderer hands, anyhow). It begins in the early 1950s in an idyllic farming village near Da Nang, and by the end of the opening credits we have advanced all the way past the French occupation and up to 1963, whence we set off on a De Sadean odyssey of Virtue Unrewarded: beatings, torture, rape, seduction, unwed motherhood, prostitution, on and on. It's a horrific tale -- founded on a pair of memoirs co-authored by Le Ly Hayslip -- and we ought not need to be told it's true in order to be able to believe it. But the trueness of it need not also make us believe the fulsomely sentimentalized treatment of it: the calendar-art landscapes, the Rembrandt-lit interiors, the cooing-dove narration (reams and reams of it: "My earliest memories were of working beside my mother in the fields," etc.), the comic-book dialogue ("This is not the way Papa taught us to be!" exclaims the pregnant unmarried heroine to her streetwalking sister), and the chest-heaving music by New Age-ist Kitaro. The jump to America, for the final hour of the movie after one and a half hours of it have passed by already, is another viable, and almost completely separable, idea: point of view of a war bride. But the treatment, satirical now instead of sentimental, is equally and quite literally broad: wide-angle shots of a double-door refrigerator and a grocery-store aisle. Hiep Thi Le, Tommy Lee Jones, Joan Chen. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd