There aren't very many film directors whose work is as inextricably associated with a specific place as Oliver Stone is with Vietnam.

And yet, every time we return there with him, we are given another of the

myriad stories he's able to conjure out of the rice and blood of this country.

Heaven and Earth was billed as the third in the Oliver Stone Vietnam trilogy,

after platoon and born on the 4th of July.

And yet it is so different from the first two that it feels as much like an Oliver Stone

Vietnam movie as Rocky Five feels like a Rocky movie. Adam wrote that. In 1991, Stone was

positively excoriated for JFK, so he returned to the womb that

birthed his creative vision for one final go-around. But can we trust him? In literature we learn of the

unreliable narrator and you have to admit post JFK and especially now Stone

resembles that remark.

But here we get a sensitive version of Stone,

carefully telling the story of our main character, Laley Haslip.

And this is crucial. It's not Stone's story to tell this time. It's hers.

You want to talk about being in the shit?

Léley was in the shit.

Her village was occupied at different times between the NVA, Viet Cong, and American forces. Her

brothers, thrown out of helicopters or gone missing.

She was raped next to an open grave, meant for her.

We don't trust this white savior and Steve Butler, played by Tommy Lee Jones, but he wears

her and us down.

The America he brings her to is a carnival mirror from the world she left behind.

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