MOVIE REVIEW
“Last Days in Vietnam”
Grade: A
Starring Pete McCloskey, Henry Kissinger and Richard Armitage. Directed by Rory Kennedy.
Unrated. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 38 minutes.
Bottom line: Full of stranger-than-fiction tales that mesmerize
By Kenneth Turan
Los Angeles Times
Sometimes the stories we think we know, the stories where we don’t want to hear another word, turn out to be the most involving of all, the ones we in fact know the least about. So it is with “Last Days in Vietnam.”
Not an examination of why we were in Vietnam or whether we should have been there in the first place, this altogether splendid documentary, directed by Rory Kennedy, is instead a thrilling and dramatic narrative of what happened in the country as the wheels started to fall off of America’s involvement.
Filled with compelling first-person stories both heroic and heartbreaking, “Last Days” details a complete debacle that brought out the best in all kinds of people. It is also the best work yet by Kennedy, the film her entire career has pointed her toward.
Using expertly selected newsreel footage and fine visual effects by Doug Whitney to supplement her interviews, Kennedy and screenwriters Mark Bailey and Keven McAlester tell a series of interlocking tales about resourceful people who “ignored the rules and followed their hearts” when they could — as well as what happened when they couldn’t.
First to speak is U.S. Army Capt. Stuart Herrington, who foregrounds the film’s theme when he explains, “as we began to contemplate evacuation, the burning question was who goes, who gets left behind.” Herrington’s galvanizing story of clandestinely evacuating the families of the Vietnamese who worked with him sets the intensely personal tone for what is to come.
The biggest chunk of “Last Days” focuses on what was to literally be the very last day in Saigon, giving an almost hour-by-hour account of what happened to a wide variety of folks, Americans and Vietnamese, in numerous locales on April 29, 1975, that fateful final date.
The situation at the American Embassy was especially chaotic. Not only did secret documents have to be destroyed but also a full eight hours was spent burning $1 million in cash. And the question of what to do with the close to 3,000 Vietnamese who had talked their way onto the embassy grounds was an especially fraught one.
Perhaps the most astonishing story of that final day is what happened on the Kirk, a small destroyer escort that was part of the U.S. fleet sent to facilitate the evacuation.
Much to its surprise, the Kirk, with but one tiny helipad, became the destination for a series of small helicopters carrying Vietnamese refugees. Because the landing space was so small, each chopper was literally pushed into the sea once it was emptied so the next one could land.
These stranger-than-fiction tales, piled one on top of the other in the most gripping way, not only mesmerize us, they also point up another of “Last Days in Vietnam’s” provocative points, that the chaos surrounding the evacuation was, in effect, the entire war in microcosm.
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