Hearts and Minds (1974)

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary film 'Harts and Minds' is a kind of collage rumination on America's role in the Vietnam War. Directed by Peter Davis who had worked for CBS News and would later work for PBS, the film has no narrator (though his audio commentary on the Criterion Collection DVD is worth a listen), instead principally through interviews tells the story of the Vietnam experience through the words of the Vietnamese themselves, government officials, solders and veterans both pro and against the war, as well as family members and the average man on the street. They follow a POW just returned form 7 years as a prisoner of war as he makes a sort of local celebrity tour in his native New Jersey, he is perhaps remarkably still for the war. They talk to Clark Clifford, a former Secretary of Defense during the war who turned against it. The Emerson's, a sweet couple who reminisce about their son who died in the war, but without great bitterness. They talk to a deserter, the wife of a solder who lost limbs, a truck driver whose undecided on the war, they talk to seemingly everybody and create a mosaic of conflicted feelings and perspectives. I think it's obvious even from the film that America's role in the Vietnam conflict was a mistake, but it doesn't hate those who feel differently, instead with a sympathetic ear it pity's most everybody and seemingly captures the essence of an era. ****