Crime novelist Dennis Lehane

DATE June 14, 2002 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Dennis Lehane talks about his best-selling novel
"Mystic River"
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Dennis Lehane's novel "Mystic River" has come out in paperback and is back on
the best-seller list. Clint Eastwood is adapting the novel into a film. Last
year, when the novel was first published, New York Times book critic Janet
Maslin wrote, `There is no better reason than "Mystic River" to stay home with
a good book.' Dennis Lehane is best known for his series of private eye
novels featuring the team of Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro.

But "Mystic River" isn't part of the series and isn't a private eye novel. It
begins in 1975, when three boys are fighting in the street and a couple of
cops drive by to break it up. Two of the boys flee. The third is picked up
by the cops, who turn out to really be child molesters posing as cops. The
boy is released after several days and returns home traumatized. The novel
picks up 25 years later and follows the lives of the three childhood friends.
One is now an ex-con who owns a corner store. His daughter has been murdered.
The other has become a homicide detective and is investigating the murder.
The third, the one who was abducted, is a suspect.

Last year, when the novel was published in hardcover, I asked Lehane if the
abduction in the novel relates to anything that happened to him as a child.

Mr. DENNIS LEHANE (Author): No. I'm not a big believer in autobiographical
fiction, if you will. I believe in, you know, the place and the flavor of the
world you grew up in. But I don't believe in the particulars. I don't
believe in, `Oh, remember when, you know, Johnny Sullivan did this? And he
had this certain way of smiling. Let's take that and put it in a book.' I
don't do that. But I do try and capture sort of, again, the texture and the
flavor of the world I grew up in.

This incident happened, actually, to myself and a friend of mine who were, you
know, not quite arrested but we were taken off the street. We were getting in
a fight when we were kids, and in the sort of heat of the moment neither of us
thought to ask for a badge. It turned out the gentlemen were cops, but that
was something that always stuck in my head, I think, because my mother looked
so terrified.

GROSS: She suspected that maybe they weren't cops?

Mr. LEHANE: No, she just didn't--she just thought the whole incident seemed
weird at the time. It turned out they were police officers, everything, but
I'll never forget the fear when, you know, she said, `Of course you saw their
badge, right?'

GROSS: Now it's this abduction that sets everything in motion in your new
novel.

Mr. LEHANE: Yep.

GROSS: There's sexual abuse in an earlier book "Gone, Baby, Gone"...

Mr. LEHANE: Yep.

GROSS: ...where a child's abducted. You worked briefly, I think, counseling
children...

Mr. LEHANE: Yes.

GROSS: ...who have been abused. What kind of work did you do?

Mr. LEHANE: I was a therapeutic counselor in a treatment facility. We would
take kids from--we would, you know, review the files in juvenile hall and we
would pick kids who we thought were sort of in the gray area between when a
victim turns into a victimizer, and we would try and get them before they
turned into victimizers and help them. And that was what we did and that was
the place I worked.

GROSS: What are some of the things that you learned during that experience
that you used in your writing?

Mr. LEHANE: Well, I remember a woman I was dating at the time said, you know,
that she had never seen me angry until I took this job, you know, that I was a
pretty, you know, even-keel type of guy. So I discovered a capacity for anger
at, I think, just the waste that I'd see. I also discovered a very sort of
dirty secret of social work, which was, you know, 9 out of 10 times it's the
parent, you can trace it back to the parent. A bad seed is a very rare thing.
And it's not society and it's not Marilyn Manson and it's not--you know, it's
kids who were abused or kids who were neglected or kids who were badly
parented who turn out to be, you know, the kind of kids who shoot up schools
or the kind of kids who become bullies or become murderers, become anything.
And then it just depends upon the level of abuse. That can dictate a lot of
things, because if the humanity is beaten out of you or sexually exploited out
of you, then it's silly to expect that that humanity will be recovered.

GROSS: My guest is writer Dennis Lehane. Your new novel, "Mystic River," is
different from your other novels in that, although there are crimes at its
center, it's not about private detectives and it's not part of your private
detective series. Why was it time for you now to get out of that series and
write a book that's independent of that?

Mr. LEHANE: Oh, I think a lot of times it's just dictated by--you know, I
wish we had a word for it--the inspiration, whatever you want to say. I was
not inspired to write a book in the series. There was nothing there. The
well was dry. And this book had been sort of gently rapping on the window for
about five or six years, and then it began to really bang on the door about
two years ago.

GROSS: What was the message as it was banging?

Mr. LEHANE: You know, `Make a hole, make it wide. Let us in.' I always
start with characters. I very rarely have a plot. And so it was just the
characters. And there was this one line, `Brendan Harris(ph) loved Katie
Marcus like crazy, loved her like movie love,' and that line just kept
spinning around in my head for years--I mean, five years probably. And so it
just--and then gradually, I got this second line which was, `It occurred to
him as he was shaving that he was evil.' And those two lines began to sort of
become the building blocks of the book.

GROSS: Where do they actually turn up in the book?

Mr. LEHANE: `Brendan Harris loved Katie Marcus like crazy,' is the very first
line of the present day chapter--first chapter in present day. That's the
first line of chapter three, which is the first chapter in the 2000 section.
And then the, `It occurred to him while he was shaving that he was evil,'
shows up in the last chapter.

GROSS: So let me to ask you read that line that first came to you before the
novel was written and now it's that first line in the first chapter set in the
present.

Mr. LEHANE: Sure. `Brendan Harris loved Katie Marcus like crazy, loved her
like movie love with an orchestra booming through his blood and flooding his
ears. He loved her waking up, going to bed, loved her all day and every
second in between. Brendan Harris would love Katie Marcus fat and ugly. He'd
love her with bad skin and no breasts and thick fuzz on her upper lip. He'd
love her toothless, he'd love her bald. Katie: The trill of her name sliding
through his brain was enough to make Brendan feel like his limbs were filled
with nitrous oxide, like he could walk on water and bench press an 18-wheeler,
toss it across the street when he was finished with it.

`Brendan Harris loved everyone now because he loved Katie and Katie loved him.
Brendan loved traffic and smog and the sound of jackhammers. He loved his
worthless old man who hadn't sent him a single birthday or Christmas card
since he'd walked out on Brendan and his mother since Brendan was six. He
loved Monday mornings and standing in line at the RMV. He even loved his job,
though he wouldn't be going in ever again.'

GROSS: So you used that sentence, that first sentence that came to your mind,
to very good effect in this passage that you just read. Have you every had a
first sentence that came to your mind that you ended up not using by the time
you actually got to writing the book?

Mr. LEHANE: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I think that so often you start with
something and all it is, is a way to get you into a book. Like my next novel,
which I've begun, I sort of already know that the first 10 pages I've written
will never make the book, you know. But I had to put it in to sort of figure
things out for myself. And the trick is you fall in love with some of the
sentences and you just got to remember that Orwell line, you know, `Murder
your darlings.'

GROSS: Right.

Mr. LEHANE: So...

GROSS: What do you like about writing familiar characters when you are
writing your private eye series?

Mr. LEHANE: Oh, it's wonderful because there's a--I think the same reason
readers read these books, is because gradually there becomes this almost
tender familiarity with these people. And they're like old friends and it's
like saying, `Come on by, have a drink,' you know. You say, `Come on into the
book. Oh, we haven't seen him in a while. We haven't seen him in 400 pages,
since, you know, book number four.'

GROSS: What are the limitations?

Mr. LEHANE: The reason I read and the reason I write is to discover things
about characters. Plot it just a vehicle to do that. That's all plot is.
It's just the actions by which a character is explicated. And I think
gradually, the more you write about a character, the less you don't know about
them, and the more you read about a character, the less you don't know about
them. And that's why, I think, that it's very rare you hear somebody speak
about a series and say, `Yeah, but the 15th book is the best.' Nobody ever
says that. They'll all say that the fifth book is the best or the third book
is the best. And I think that's because the characters have become overly
familiar and there is no sense of a journey, there are no epiphanies left to
have about this person. So I think that's the point when you got to pull the
plug.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. LEHANE: I don't know if I've reached that point yet. I don't think I
have, but I think I'm near it.

GROSS: My guest is writer Dennis Lehane. His latest novel is "Mystic River."
We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Dennis Lehane. His latest novel, "Mystic River," is on
the best-seller list.

Did you have any relatives who were cops...

Mr. LEHANE: No.

GROSS: ...or friends' fathers who were cops? Not to just dwell on cliche,
but you grew up in an Irish neighborhood and, you know, a lot of--particularly
when you were growing up, probably a lot of Irish fathers were cops.

Mr. LEHANE: Oddly, no. No, not with my friends. One of my closest friend's
uncle was a rather prominent cop, but I had very little contact with him. My
wife's family are all cops, but I didn't grow up around cops. I grew up
around laborers. You know, my father worked for Sears and Roebuck. Most of
my friends' fathers worked--you know, they were truck drivers and occasionally
a postman. But, no, we didn't grow up with that law enforcement vibe around
us.

GROSS: Did your opinion of or relationship with cops change from childhood to
adulthood?

Mr. LEHANE: No. I think one of the greatest things about growing up in the
inner city, if you see it correctly, was that we always knew the places never
to go and, say, drink, for example, when you're 17 years old, underage
drinking or smoke pot or whatever. The places to never commit crimes were
small towns, because they always had the absolute toughest cops, because they
had--our opinion at the time was they had nothing better to do, where in the
inner city we had police officers and they were, a lot of times, putting their
life, you know, pretty much on the line. They were the ones dealing with
gangs. They were the ones dealing with shootouts and homicides, etc.. And
so they tended to be very easy to deal with if you weren't in their face. And
I think that was because they had a relative sense.

So if they caught a couple of underage kids drinking beer, they took your beer
and they walked away. They didn't have anything to prove, I guess. So I
think that gave me a respect for the city cop, for the guy who really has to
go out and literally put his life on the line, whereas small-town police, to
some extent, is a bit of a Napoleon complex.

GROSS: Dennis Lehane is my guest. There's a passage describing the
neighborhood that the characters in your book grew up in that I'm going to ask
you to read.

Mr. LEHANE: Sure. `They all lived in East Buckingham, just west of downtown,
a neighborhood of cramped corner stores, small playgrounds and butcher shops
where meat, still pink with blood, hung in the windows. The bars had Irish
names and Dodge Darts by the curbs. Women wore handkerchiefs tied off at the
backs of their skulls and carried mock leather snap purses for their
cigarettes.

`Until a couple of years ago, older boys have been plucked from the streets as
if by spaceships and sent to war. They came back hollow and sullen a year or
so later or they didn't come back at all. Dazed mothers searched the papers
for coupons. Nights, the fathers went to the bars. You knew everyone.
Nobody, except those older boys, ever left.'

GROSS: Is that an accurate description of the neighborhood you grew up in?

Mr. LEHANE: Yeah, I think that's pretty close. If you look back--my brother
and I, we're always stunned to look back at pictures taken of us in '71, '73
and we look like we just, you know, stepped off Main Street in Mayberry. I
mean, you know, we still had the buzz cuts, still--you know, the clothing was
much more what you would think of in, say, 1963 Brooklyn, you know, just the
look of everything. It was, you know--and then, you know, right down the
street practically--you know, a couple of miles away, essentially, there's,
you know, student sit-ins at Harvard. And Harvard Square looks like what you
expect Harvard Square to look like circa 1971 and '72. But none of that
reached the neighborhoods.

GROSS: Why do you want write about that neighborhood now?

Mr. LEHANE: In your 20s, if you're a writer, you spend a lot of your 20s
discovering your strengths and your limitations. And what I discovered is
while I could write about any place and do it adequately, the stuff that
struck a cord, that really reached people at a gut level, was the stuff I set
in, you know, inner-city, Northeastern neighborhoods. Gradually you just go,
`You know, well, Fitzgerald never really wrote about poor people really well
and Faulkner never wrote anything set outside of Mississippi that was any
good. And so maybe that's my limitation. Maybe I shouldn't be trying on all
these hats. Maybe I should go to my strength.'

GROSS: When you were a kid in the early '70s with the buzz cut, looking like
you were in "Mayberry RFD," what was your attitude about the college students
protesting on Harvard? What did you think of them?

Mr. LEHANE: Oh, well, we had, I think, a very neighborhood attitude, which
was--you know, this was also when busing was ripping the inner city apart,
and there was this very--a siege mentality took over, because the attitude of
the establishment, certainly the establishment newspapers, was that it was a
racial issue, where the people who were in the neighborhoods felt it was much
more of a class warfare issue. It was about people who didn't live in the
neighborhoods making decisions that affected the neighborhoods and then
stepping back and letting the neighborhoods suffer.

And I think certainly the sense of the--you know, when we'd see the news and
we'd see what was going on at Harvard or what was going on at, you know,
Berkeley out in California, or wherever, there was a sense of they're
dilettante, you know. They're the fortunate sons, where the people who are
truly suffering for this aren't protesting because they're dead or they're
dying because they couldn't afford to go to college, etc. So I think that was
certainly--there was never a sense in my neighborhood that anybody thought
Vietnam was a good idea. You know, never. I remember it was very clear, my
father was--you know, if my brother ever got to that age, which he neared just
as the war ended, you know, my father was ready to put him on a plane to
Canada.

GROSS: The characters in your new novel "Mystic River" don't go home at night
and, you know, read novels.

Mr. LEHANE: No.

GROSS: Were you a reader as a child?

Mr. LEHANE: Oh, God.

GROSS: And was that unusual in your neighborhood or in your family?

Mr. LEHANE: Yes, it was in both. Well, my brothers were readers, my older
brothers. You know, they read a lot of, you know, S.E. Hinton and, you know,
Robert Ludlum and things like that. So, no, there was read--and my sister
read a lot of classics. So there was reading in my family, certainly. And I
just picked it up at a much more ferocious clip. I mean, I started reading
when I was six. My mother took me to the library when I was six, and it's
still the most pivotal event in my life; you know, changed everything. And so
did it seem a little odd to the neighborhood? Yeah, definitely. But the
great thing is is that everybody was pretty cool about it, too. You know, it
wasn't like everybody said, you know--well, I didn't wear glasses. But I
wasn't ostracized for being a reader. It was just, you know, `That Lehane kid
is a little odd,' you know, in the same way that you'd say it about, you know,
the kid who, every winter, would stick his tongue to the pole.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. LEHANE: You know, `He's all right but he's a little odd.' So...

GROSS: Did you have anyone to talk to about what you were reading?

Mr. LEHANE: No, not for the most part. I think that certainly I was in a
vacuum when it came to that, at least until I got to high school. But there's
nothing--that's a good vacuum to be in, I think, because by the time I got to
college, for example--and I dropped out of a couple of colleges. The second
one I was an English lit major and I didn't particularly enjoy talking about
writing or literature. I enjoyed reading it and I enjoyed practicing it if I
could. But I didn't like talking about it.

And I think that's a good attribute for a writer to have. Because I've seen a
lot of writers, you know, who I went to school with, who got waylaid by
becoming critics, essentially, by talking too much about theories behind
writing. And that's not conducive to being a good writer. I mean, F. Scott
Fitzgerald had a great line where he said, `A writer should not be the
smartest guy in the room. He should just be the most observant.' And, you
know, so, again, I didn't talk much with people, but I think that was good
early on.

GROSS: You know, you've written or are writing, I believe, a screenplay based
on one of your private eye novels.

Mr. LEHANE: Yes.

GROSS: So do you have in mind the type of actor you'd like to play your
private eyes Patrick and Angie? And I'm wondering, do you want them to be
ultra-attractive or just to have a lot of screen presence?

Mr. LEHANE: Oh, no, I like--I'm much more of a character actor guy. I like
people who just--that whatever it is they got, nobody else has it, you know.
And I'm not talking star power but, say, a guy like Will Patten, for example.
I don't even know if you know who that is.

GROSS: Yeah, I do.

Mr. LEHANE: Now there's a guy, you put him on the screen and you know nobody
else is going to give a performance like him, nobody. Will Patten is Will
Patten, you know. So I tend towards character actors, which would make me a
very bad Hollywood producer because I wouldn't get, necessarily, bankable
stars. I think a perfect Patrick would be Ray Liotta. Although he might be a
few years older than him, I think he'd be great. But I don't think Hollywood
considers him an A-list star, if you know what I mean, the way they would,
say, a Ben Affleck...

GROSS: Right.

Mr. LEHANE: ...or a Tom Cruise or something like that. So, yeah, I have my
theories but I also know they're rather impractical.

GROSS: Dennis Lehane. His latest novel, "Mystic River," is now out in
paperback and is back on the best-seller list. Clint Eastwood is adapting it
into a movie. Our interview was recorded last year when the novel was
published in hardcover. By the way, Ben Affleck is reported to be considering
starring in a film of one of Lehane's detective novels.

I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

(Credits)

GROSS: Coming up, Phil Jackson. This week, he led the LA Lakers to their
third consecutive NBA championship. Also, a talk with painter Larry Rivers.
A major retrospective of his work is now at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in
Washington, DC. And film critic Henry Sheehan reviews "Windtalkers," directed
by John Woo.

(Soundbite of music)

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Interview: Phil Jackson talks about coaching the LA Lakers
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

This week the LA Lakers won their third consecutive NBA championship and their
coach, Phil Jackson, became the league's all-time winner in post-season
coaching victories. In addition to Jackson's three Lakers championships, he
led the Chicago Bulls to six championships and won twice as a player with the
New York Knicks. We're going to listen back to an excerpt of the interview I
recorded with Jackson one year ago, when he and the Lakers were a couple of
games away from winning the playoffs against the Philadelphia 76ers.

Can you compare the experience of coaching the Lakers and the Bulls?

Mr. PHIL JACKSON (Coach, Los Angeles Lakers): No. It's still coaching, but
it's so different. It's such a different team. It's such a different
relationship that I have with the team. I'm the same person in many ways,
different group of guys. The team in Chicago were mostly young, married men
with young families. It was kind of a community of young kids growing up
together, wives and families that were involved and intertwined. There was
really a remarkable resilience about that team because they supported each
other just unequivocally. Their roles were ordered almost impeccably from
Michael through Scottie Pippen down through the order of the players that just
all related very well as to how they had to do it. They could support a
character like Dennis Rodman for three years, even though he was, you know, a
maverick in many ways. And there was an end in sight. They knew that it
was--you know, there was an age in this team. They knew that, `Hey, were
going to last this year, maybe we'll get one more year.' And we got that one
more year, and then `Maybe we could do it again,' then we had a three-peat
championship.

But those players all moved into maybe retirement or moved on or quit the
game. And this group is a bunch of young players. It's a different
generation. There's very little--very few guys are married. There's not that
community. And yet we have a community that's altogether different and still
vibrant and very tight.

GROSS: I'm wondering if the age difference between you and the players, as
you get older and the players stay more or less the same age or even younger
than the previous team you coached, if there are certain differences that are
difficult to reconcile. And what I'm thinking of particularly is the whole
respect thing.

Mr. JACKSON: Yeah.

GROSS: Like, the meaning of respect to a lot of people in their 20s now and
the meaning of disrespect and what can be interpreted as disrespect is
probably really different than, for instance, when you were playing or when
you started coaching.

Mr. JACKSON: Definitely. Without a doubt, Terry. I think you hit that
point very well, that it's--the last time we were in Philadelphia to play,
Kobe and I had a little bit of a tiff on the bench and I actually felt that he
was trying to do too much on the court, and he wanted to argue with me. And
so I sat him on the bench. I was willing to sit him in a certain point in the
game that I felt was important. Shaq was out a game, so we were without two
of our stars for that period of time, but I wanted him to know that I didn't
want him to argue with me at that point. When we got in the locker room, we
had another discussion and he felt like I had disrespected him by imposing
upon him the fact that he was being selfish, again cubbyholing him into this
curtain. And I said, `Fine. We'll watch the tape together again and sort it
out tomorrow.' So I realize, you know, that's one disrespect, that, you know,
`Don't pigeonhole me with what you think that I was doing that, you know, is a
preconceived idea that you have of my game.'

And the game itself is played to a little different beat. Hip-hop and that
kind of generational, you know, noise that's going on has a lot of kind of
gangster, not being respected...

GROSS: Right.

Mr. JACKSON: ...you know, being oppressed, you know, riding the line, living
at the edge, willing to sacrifice yourself for your own honor. Those kind of
things, I think, are big parts of the culture in this group of youth right
now. And I have to respect that for whatever it's worth. As much as I wanted
my elders to respect my particular beliefs that I had in the late '60s about
war and about countries going to war and about youth being drafted and so
forth. So, I mean, I have to respect where they're coming from and wonder
where it's taking them to.

GROSS: But some of that goes against some of your values, you know, that
living on the edge and the speed and a lot of the kind of bragging of rap and
the kind of thug aspects of it. That kind of goes against who you are as a
coach and what you want from your players as a coach.

Mr. JACKSON: Well, the part that I like about coaching is my ability to
influence. I have been able to kind of take them through, you know, like,
violence. Is gun violence appropriate, you know, and the idea of possessing
and owning guns and making them think those thoughts. And I like the fact
that on Martin Luther King Day, we have a game on that day, and I can always
talk about, you know, Martin Luther King and peaceful resistance, you know,
and the ability for people to make things happen without having to take armed
stands, you know, and having to defend oneself through rational, reasonable
approaches.

GROSS: Now you're on camera a lot during the games.

Mr. JACKSON: Yes.

GROSS: Are you conscious of that, and are you trying to maintain a public
face knowing that at any minute there might be a cutaway to you?

Mr. JACKSON: Well, I think we've all had our embarrassing moments on film
that--coaches or players, that you're, you know, either caught in a position
where you're yelling or something's happened to you or, you know, you might
even be wiping your nose or whatever. But every action that's a reaction, the
camera comes back to you. And I've gotten used to that over the years, and I
try to remain really equal about my emotions at that time and not to vent or
not to do anything.

But I learned that lesson, not so much from the camera, but from, you know,
having a player like Dennis Rodman on the team, who fed directly almost off
the emotional state of the coach. And I realized that the more animated I
got, the more animated he felt he had to be, and it would create this chain
reaction. And I felt that the calmer and the easier I was on the whole
attitude of the game, the better he felt about the game, and the team
responded likewise. And so I've tried to maintain that since that time.

GROSS: Yeah, like, one sports columnist said something like, `Phil Jackson
uncrossed his leg,' you know, like, `Wow. What emotion he showed.'

Mr. JACKSON: Yeah. People always say, `You're not doing much coaching over
there.'

GROSS: I want to quote one more thing from your book "More Than a Game." You
say, `In 1998, after 44 years of being continuously involved with basketball,
I cashed in my chips and,' quote, `"retired" after winning my sixth
championship with the Bulls. In the middle of the journey that is my life, I
had lost my way.' What did you mean by that, by having lost your way before
getting back to basketball?

Mr. JACKSON: Well, really the career in basketball became, you know, so
dominant in my life that I felt like I had lost my kids, my family. It was
almost impossible to stay in touch with them at some level with the amount of
traveling and everything. And it felt like, you know, somehow or other I kind
of lost the whole process of this family that I was very, very connected to
for many years. And, you know, I went through a period of separation with my
wife and, you know, been separated since I've gone to LA. And for a period of
time it was very devastating for me because I'd felt like I'd lost my family.
But I found that I hadn't lost my family at all, we'd just grown to different
positions. And, you know, kids are here with me in Philadelphia, and it's
great. I have five kids and--lots of kids, and they love to come to the
finals. It's become like a family ritual, and it's amazing that they can be
here.

GROSS: Phil Jackson recorded one year ago. This week he led the Lakers to
their third consecutive NBA championship, his ninth championship as a coach.

Coming up, painter Larry Rivers. This is FRESH AIR.

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Filler: By policy of WHYY, this information is restricted and has
been omitted from this transcript

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Review: New film "Windtalkers"
TERRY GROSS, host:

"Windtalkers" is a new World War II film starring Nicolas Cage, directed by
John Woo, who also directed Cage in "Face/Off." "Windtalkers" is set in the
Pacific and is about a Marine platoon which includes a Navajo radio operator
who is a code talker, trained to transmit battlefield messages in an
unbreakable code based on the Navajo language. Film critic Henry Sheehan has
a review.

HENRY SHEEHAN:

When John Woo decides to tackle a genre, he doesn't have to go out and give
himself a mini course in masterpieces. Growing up in one of Hong Kong's
poorest, most overcrowded slums, Woo sought relief in local movie theaters,
especially the ones featuring American films. Now the 56-year-old director,
who has worked in Hollywood for nearly 10 years, has made his first American
combat film, and it's everything you want in a big Hollywood action picture.
Nicolas Cage stars as a war-weary Marine who discovers that his new assignment
is not so much to kill Japanese, though he's welcome to do that, so much as it
is to murder a Navajo radio man if he looks like he's about to be captured.

Working from a skeletal script by John Rice and Joe Batteer, Woo has
emblazoned his screen with all the familiar elements of a World War II drama.
Sergeant Joe Enders is a bitter veteran of past battles by the time the movie
begins, suspicious of honors and leery of friendships. A platoon's worth of
soldiers are drawn from the usual ethnic and regional cross-sections. And as
you might expect, dramatic tensions arise from the trouble the men have in
subordinating their individuality to the group.

Woo treats these familiarities as signposts for further expression, not
monuments to movies past, which is the difference between classicism and
attunement. It might sound strange to describe a filmmaker who made his
reputation directing Hong Kong action fare in which the bullets fly like
confetti and no shot seems to last longer than a nanosecond as a classicist.
But the more you gaze into the maelstrom of Woo's films, the more you begin to
recognize that they're built on the traditional structures of friendship
tested under fire--love, in other words.

As "Windtalkers" gets under way, Enders has finished recuperating in a Hawaii
hospital following a disastrous personal experience in the Solomon Islands.
The young NCO's entire command was wiped out. Here, after lying to get back
into active service, he's told about his responsibilities with a new Navajo
radio man.

(Soundbite of "Windtalkers")

Unidentified Actor: What I'm about to tell you, Corporal, cannot leave this
room. Under no circumstances can you allow your code talker to fall into
enemy hands. Your mission is to protect the code at all costs. You
understand me?

Mr. NICOLAS CAGE: Yes, sir, I do.

Unidentified Actor: Good. Congratulations. You just made sergeant.

SHIN: You can't tell it from that one line, but in Nicolas Cage, Woo has
found the American equivalent to his favorite Hong Kong actor, Chow Yun-Fat.
Woo directed Cage in "Face/Off," but that cinematic buzz saw would have
shredded anyone's performance. Here, Cage is a heavy-lidded, soured romantic,
a Western Chow in a perfect embodiment of the Woo hero fighting to spare as he
fends off the enemy.

Enders and the code talker Yahzee hook up uneasily on the eve of the invasion
of the heavily fortified island of Saipan. The invasion itself is an
extraordinary piece of filmmaking, both in its breadth and in its
self-control. It probably doesn't take up more than an economical three
minutes and starts with a flying camera following planes swooping over the
landing beach. From there, it slowly falls to earth, capturing scenes of
various engagements until it finally catches up with Enders and Yahzee.
Enders, in his terror at having to kill someone he knows, has adopted an
attitude of hostility towards Yahzee. He shuts himself down emotionally,
refusing to open himself up to a partner he may have to kill. He starts dying
inside. To prevent the Japanese from capturing Yahzee, Enders turns himself
into a fanatical killing machine.

Since the '70s, Woo's heroes have been facing this dilemma. A larger world of
social or national obligations puts them at excruciating odds with the more
intimate world of personal or even familial bonds. Enders fits into this
series, but not so neatly that he's just another square peg. Instead, he's
another richly human variation, just as "Windtalkers" itself is another
enriched take on the traditional Hollywood combat movie.

GROSS: Henry Sheehan is a film critic based in Los Angeles.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
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