Biloxi Blues

In 1945 Eugene Jerome, a young man from Brooklyn, is drafted for basic training in Mississippi. The heat, the strangeness of his sergeant and the tension in the barracks all arrive at once. Eugene writes everything in his notebook, and one day the notebook is found. Mike Nichols directed, from Neil Simon's play, adapted by Simon himself. Matthew Broderick plays Eugene, Christopher Walken plays Sergeant Toomey. This is the middle part of Simon's autobiographical trilogy of plays, and Broderick had played the character on stage. The weight is Walken's. Toomey is neither wholly cruel nor comic; he is written as a man with a head wound from the war and uncertain judgement, and the actor preserves that uncertainty. The subject is not soldiering but the formation of a writer: Eugene observes the people around him and what he writes hurts his friends. Antisemitism and the expulsion of a gay soldier are the hardest sections; the comic tone stops entirely there. Who it is for: viewers who like Neil Simon adaptations and period comedy. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a war film; there is no combat.