Regret to Inform (1998)
Regret to Inform (Directed by Barbara Sonneborn, 1998) A common complaint about filmic representations of the Vietnam war, particularly those produced in Hollywood, is that the films tend to focus too narrowly on the personal relationships of the characters involved, ignoring not only the political context of the war but also the viewpoint of its Vietnamese participants. This trend is perhaps epitomized in Hal Ashby’s Coming Home(1978), where the particulars of the Vietnam War are largely overlooked and the conflict is presented as little more than a plot device that sets the film’s romance and melodrama into motion. In short, Hollywood’s emphasis on personal struggles and triumphs acts to obscure the politics of the war and the larger power structures that lie behind the military actions.
The task of situating the Vietnam War within its geo-political context has traditionally fallen to documentary or non-fiction films, most notably Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig (1968) and Peter Davis’s Hearts and Minds (1974), two of the three feature length films produced about the war while it was taking place. More recently, Errol Morris’s chilling Fog of War (2003) has taken this approach.
Nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards and winner of numerous honors on the film festival circuit, Regret to Inform bridges the gap between these two cinematic trends. The film, which follows writer-director Barbara Sonneborn’s pilgrimage to the site where her husband died in Vietnam, examines the Vietnam War and its effects through the eyes of the women whose husbands who did not have the good fortune of coming home. As Sonneborn approaches her destination, the tales of other war widows are interwoven with her own journey.
Particularly moving is the story of her traveling companion and translator, Nguyen Ngoc Xuan, whose harrowing youthful turn to prostitution as a means to escape the violence and danger of the war casts the disturbingly blunt brothel scene of Hearts and Minds in a new, even harsher light. Here, the prostitutes of Davis’s film, who serve as little more than metaphors for the exploitation of Vietnam, are given a background of familial tragedy and bloodshed.
By focusing on the stories and struggles of Vietnamese victims of the war, the film transcends the intimate narratives and interviews which could have limited its focus. The Vietnamese war widows are given a voice and humanized in a way that encourages pathos. Vietnamese women recount their experiences of torture at the hands of South Vietnamese and American forces and reveal their own hurt at the loss of their family members, showing how the war affected those who were forced to live amidst the violence.
But the film does not dwell on the sorrow of the American and Vietnamese wives as though it were felt in a vacuum. The turn against the war among the American widows is shown when one wife questions the justification of the conflict. “Is your husband a hero?” she asks. “Is he a murderer? What is he? Did he kill people over there? Yes, he probably did. And were these people a threat to his country? No, they were not...I don’t see my husband as a murderer, but at the same time we have to look at it for what it is and it is murder. And is it justifiable?” In her slow examination of the harsh realities of the war, the woman must slowly face the facts that we must all face: that an illegal war, carried out by our friends and family, took innocent lives. Though the film points no fingers at specific policymakers, it asks questions that foreground the war not as an inevitable event but a conflict that resulted from policies centered around inhumane and callous ideologies.
While the past can not be undone, Sonneborn’s film, by focusing on the pain and anguish of war and appealing to a sense of universal humanity, calls on viewers to heed the lessons of the dead and work towards a future where war is not made lightly, if at all. In showing the tragic aftermath of the war and spending due time on the suffering of the Vietnamese, Barbara Sonneborn’s Regret to Inform deserves to be shown and discussed along with the Vietnam classics of de Antonio and Davis.
Anthony McCosham Bowling Green State University mccosha@bgnet.bgsu.edu
