The Cutting Room Floor: A Few Good Men

Columnist: Sydney Reade

Editor-in-chief: Yasmin Alameddine

Another celebrity behind the scenes of the entertainment industry, Aaron Sorkin, has made waves recently for his apparent “apology” for his work on the HBO series The Newsroom. He reportedly said sorry to journalists who took issue with the show for trying to teach them how to do their jobs. Sorkin said this was a misunderstanding, and that he is only just now learning how to write the series, despite the fact that it is going into its third and last season this summer. I personally don’t see what Sorkin has to apologize for, but fortunately he’s written many other amazing television shows and films, including 1992’s A Few Good Men.

 If you’ve ever told someone that they “can’t handle the truth,” then you got that line from this movie. Specifically, from Jack Nicholson’s explosive performance as Col. Nathan Jessup. But really, the main character is Lt. Daniel Kaffee (played by Tom Cruise), a green U.S. Navy lawyer who takes over the case of two U.S. Marines accused of killing a fellow Marine. But Kaffee is a known plea bargainer, which angers Lt. JoAnne Galloway (played by Demi Moore) who was originally assigned to the case and thinks the accused were carrying out a code red order from Jessup. Of course, the notion that people who are meant to protect our country and are highly trained to kill could be using their skills to kill other people outside of the parameters of war is deeply unsettling to all involved. Such courts operate by their own rules, and the judges tend to have a “protect their own” mentality. The question becomes, who can handle the truth, and what are they going to do about it?

Just in case the star power alone isn’t enough to make you want to watch this movie, then I urge you to do so on the basis of the writing and the storyline. This topic has come up before in the realm of movies, but often a film’s value comes from the unfamiliar worlds they are able to portray. Life on a military compound, the inner workings of the Marines, and military courts are all unfamiliar worlds that are busted wide open under Aaron Sorkin’s incisive pen.

It’s hard to describe how good of a writer Sorkin is until you start to watch some of his stuff in comparison to other TV shows or movies out there. Sorkin holds his characters to a higher standard, a standard he’d like to see every civilian live up to in the world. This means they are razor sharp smart, witty, and always ready with the answer. They do things not because they stand to gain anything—in fact, often times the characters have to take deep personal risks—but because they’re the right things to do. At first Daniel Kaffee is the antithesis of this, the scared lawyer who thinks he’ll never win a case unless it’s settled out of court, but he is eventually convinced by the moral Galloway that whether or not he wins, defending the Marines and exposing the existence of code red orders serves a higher purpose. The dialogue is near perfect in that it veers just off the mark of actual speech, enough to be literary in quality. Of course, the criticism is that Sorkin’s characters are almost too perfect—when you’re being grilled on the witness stand, is likely you’re going to come up with a gem like “You can’t handle the truth”? When Kaffee walks into a meeting late, does it seem plausible that his boss will deliver the funniest line of the movie, “Kaffee, I know you don’t have a good excuse so I won’t force you to come up with a bad one”? Probably not. But what Sorkin’s movies do is show us the ideal of what people could say in such situations, and learning to aspire to that level of intelligence and eloquence is worth every second spent watching this film.