by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

Heartbreak Ridge is a movie only Clint Eastwood could have made, and he only could have made it during a time in his career when he was taking his biggest risks as a filmmaker, storyteller and an actor. In my mind, Eastwood has made some incredible films, and he’s made some atrocious dreck, and he’s traversed one end of the spectrum in the war genre alone. The strength of Heartbreak Ridge is allowing its main character, Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Highway, to be flawed. Not “flawed but heroic” or “flawed with an asterisk”—straight-up flawed. Flawed, wrong and lost.

The movie begins with Highway in jail for his drunken antics, bragging about his exploits as a natural born killer, a warrior of the battlefield. The judge isn’t impressed with his valor or his bravery, and makes it clear that he’s avoiding charges because he has a guardian angel in the United States Marine Corps keeping him out of trouble. Highway doesn’t seem to have many friends at work, either. Everyone is sick of his shit. 

Highway’s eventual redemption comes in the form of being assigned the task of taking a group of slackers at his old unit and making them war-ready. It’s a classic “slobs vs snobs” plot, not unlike Stripes, but with a more dramatic, character-driven edge. At first, the platoon hates his guts (and he hates theirs), but eventually they begin to find common ground. They need him to stay alive, to survive the carnage of warfare, and his job is to train them well enough that they will be able to come home.

Somehow, something about Heartbreak Ridge just works. God, is it ever a relic of its time, though. The movie is filled to the brim with homophobic slurs, both as an insult and as a general catch-all for the young marines’ banter. Beyond the classic F-word “fuck” I have a feeling that the second-most-used swear is that dreaded other F-word, that’s a lot less fun. Part of what works about Heartbreak Ridge is that the dialogue, in general, is a lot better than most similar movies of the era. It feels like a play. We sit back and we watch the story unfold, through the voices of its cast, and they imbue it with a genuine energy and enthusiasm. Some of the banter almost feels like a prototype to what Quentin Tarantino would take and refine in the 1990s, where the dialogue doesn’t need to be 100% necessary to advance the plot. We can instead sit and watch characters talk and get enjoyment from the interesting, funny things that they have to say.

Heartbreak Ridge also manages to really show the military as a job. Not an act of heroism, not something that must be done for the service of the country, but something people need to do in order to pay the bills. Mario Van Peebles plays Corporal “Stich” Jones, perpetually broke, and struggling to make it as a musician on the weekends. He needs the Marines because no one else will have him. Highway also has to contend with the bureaucrats behind the scenes who are interested in the advancement of their career, and will cheap out on things like training and equipment in order to get it. The lives of their own people are second to their monetary goals. 

Outside of the training sequences and the battle scenes at the end, Highway tries to redeem his personal life and rekindle an old romance with his ex-wife, who left him because he was too busy enlisting in every war that came America’s way to put any work into his crumbling marriage. In a lesser movie, the battlefield of marriage mirroring an actual battlefield would be almost unbelievably corny, but Eastwood manages to handle it with grace and genuine contemplation. Marsha Mason as Aggie, his ex, is a scene-stealer. She makes the most of her screen time, so when they’re together, arguing and yelling at each other, we want to see what happens next. It’s not some unwanted detour from the main plot, it’s something we want to play out. 

By the time the action moves to the battlefield at the end—taking place during the invasion of Grenada—we’ve spent a lot of time with these characters and care about what happens to them. Everything comes to fruition. Highway’s no-nonsense leadership, the platoon’s newly-forged relationship with each other, and their strengths in working together as a team, it’s all there, cleanly told, in classic filmmaking form. There are no loose ends left untied. The whole thing is wrapped up in a neat, little package and Heartbreak Ridge manages to combine all the comforts of conventional filmmaking with a realistic, cinéma verité style look at the Marines in their day-to-day lives and naturalistic dialogue. 

Heartbreak Ridge is the kind of movie that was in constant rotation on TV when I was a kid, and it’s perfect for that. It’s a movie that’s better than it has any right to be, but not too much better, because the predictability is part of its overall charm. 

Eastwood has done better (Letters From Iwo Jima) and he’s done worse (American Sniper) but Heartbreak Ridge has a breezy likability that shows him at the top of his game. He’s able to make us root for a barely-repentant piece of shit like Gunnery Sergeant Highway, who’s in classical antihero mode. Eastwood, especially early in his career, never liked to give easy answers to his audience or paint in black and white, so a character like this is really where he feels at home and does his best work.