Beyond Glory

Lang is a consummate performer. With fluidity and panache, he morphs into eight Medal of Honor vets. His rugged, self-possessed bearing renders the soldiers recounting their experiences during WWII and the Korean and Vietnam wars completely believable. The description by James Bond Stockdale (Ross Perot's 1992 VP running mate) of POW torture in Hanoi is particularly harrowing.

We could easily be so dazzled by Lang's performance—and the massive, stylized images projected behind him—that we're blinded to the troubling undercurrents. Beyond Glory is very much of a genre: the NPR and nightly news stories (impossible to hear without choking up) of young soldiers' brief and heroic lives. But after a while, we wonder why these programs rarely imagine non-American lives with such sensitivity. Under the guise of apolitical human-interest stories, such coverage makes us forget there's another side.

That's ultimately what watching Lang's all-American play is like. And that makes it tough to swallow his point that men are men, regardless of race, creed or politics. When an African-American soldier movingly details the prejudice he suffered in WWII, we begin to question why voices of dissent are conspicuously absent. It isn't merely coincidental that the Japanese-American soldier voices his loyalty the most clearly.

To Lang's credit, a couple of men briefly recognize the humanity of those they're fighting. Overall, however, Beyond Glory implicitly values the lives of those inside our borders over those outside. That isn't patriotism; it's flirting dangerously with jingoism.—Novid Parsi