Director: Joel Schumacher
Starring: Colin Farrell, Matthew Davis, Clifton Collins Jr, Thomas Guiry, Shea Whigham, Russel Richardson

What do you do when you’re having a mid-life crisis and you already own the flash cars, the motorbike and the Hollywood lifestyle? Joel Schumacher has, for almost twenty years, been a purveyor of unflinchingly offensive Big Movies, from ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’, ‘Flatliners’ and ‘The Lost Boys’ to ‘8mm’ and ‘Batman and Robin’, undoubtedly the nadir of nineties cinema. But then something strange happened — he remembered how to make a good film. And he did it by losing everything. The underrated ‘Flawless’, a quite remarkable and delicate character study which brought the best out of Robert De Niro and Philip Seymour Hoffman, was the first step in his recovery program, but it could not prepare you for the spectacular paradigm shift Schumacher’s work undergoes with ‘Tigerland’.

With a band of mostly unknown actors, a 16mm camera and the brattish skills of wunderkind director of photography Matthew Libatique (‘Pi’, ‘Requiem for a Dream’), Schumacher takes us back to 1971 and the midst of Vietnam, to the eponymous ‘Tigerland’, where conscripted kids are turned into killing machines in a most hellish of boot camps, before being shipped out to a war which has lost public support and all hope of victory.

Like Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Full Metal Jacket’, ‘Tigerland’ is at its heart a character driven piece, exploring the depths to which a mind can sink when it is being asked to kill other human beings in the name of politics. Private Bozz (‘Ballykissangel’ star Colin Farrell) is a traditional agitator with a murky background, willing to do anything he can to get kicked out rather than shipped out. Bozz’s defiance in the face of savage beatings and humiliation is documented by the fascinated Private Paxton (Matthew Davis), who enlisted for the war in order to give him inspiration in his writing.

While Bozz uses his skills and impeccable knowledge of military law to get others home to their families, he can do nothing to save himself from what lies ahead, and his actions drive an increasingly large wedge into the ranks of A-Company. When so many men are so consumed by fear and paranoia, eventually something has to snap, and when it does, there is nobody there to save them but themselves.

Schumacher was inspired to make ‘Tigerland’ after stumbling across the Dogma manifesto and the films of Lars von Trier. Shot in a month, without traditional lighting, special effects or overbearing music, ‘Tigerland’ feels uncomfortably real. Libatique’s obsessions with overexposure and colour saturation lend the film a surreal, almost painterly feel, which sits at odds with the edgy handheld movements to give Spielberg a lesson in how to really convey the dirtiness of battle.

Boot camp dramas are nothing new, and are always destined to be compared to ‘Full Metal Jacket’, a high-water mark which Schumacher wisely stays well away from. The greatest achievement of ‘Tigerland’ is that it conveys the true horror of battle while firing hardly a shot, or even following the characters to the war. The film’s turmoil is internal, and all its battles are mental. Screenwriter Ross Klavan spent time as a young soldier in the real ‘Tigerland’ and it is real experience which informs his savage exploration of a military machine which was concerned with little else but throwing more and more bodies at the war.

‘Tigerland’ is a prescient warning of what the world may face in times not far away, and its raw, powerful performances from every single actor only add to its cinema verite documentary feel. Let us all hope Schumacher does not return to the Hollywood machine after his brief stint slumming it in the arthouses — his last two films have shown that rather than a great moviemaker, he may actually surprise us all by becoming a great filmmaker.