Private Benjamin

I loved this movie, and it was nothing like what I expected. This is a 1980 classic starring Goldie Hawn. It’s called Private Benjamin and the poster is her in military fatigues and runny mascara. I assumed it would be a fish out of water about pretty Goldie Hawn who has somehow wound up in the military and she hates in but then she learns about herself and grows to love it and change for the better as a person. Propaganda but fun, with a lot of big physical comedy “gags.”

But it wasn’t really that at all and I was so happily surprised and then sad because I was feeling how much art is limited when the people in charge only care about money. When I imagined someone trying to make this movie now I immediately pictured a white man in a suit saying, “How will we market this? What kind of story is it? It’s too broad, you need to pick one thing.”

Let me back up, if you haven’t seen or aren’t familiar. Goldie Hawn plays Judy Benjamin, a woman we meet on the day of her wedding at 29 to a man named Yale (Albert Brooks). In the short time we know him, he coerces her into sex twice, once to give him a blowjob in the limo during their reception, and then on their wedding night when he insists on ‘taking’ her in the bathroom despite her numerous protestations and requests to move to the bedroom. Then he dies on top of her.

At the wedding we briefly meet Judy’s mother and father who gift her a ton of money then ignore her and mostly seem happy to have pawned her off on a successful man. It is briefly mentioned she had a marriage before this one that lasted 6 weeks and that her father “bailed” her out of.

Following the death there is a funeral (usually how it goes), where relatives seem pushy for her to “get back out there” because what else is she going to do/she has no skills. There is a very funny moment where Yale’s mother comes up crying and asks what his last words were and Judy says, “I’m coming.” Lol. She was also laying on this big blue receiving bed in the front room of the house where the memorial was held and that was cool. She’s in a black dress and sheer tights on the bed as person after person just comes up and isn’t consoling or helpful or kind at all, I really liked that scene and how it subtly established what people in her life think of her and how they treat her.

Judy leaves the house and checks into a motel for a week where she cries every night. We see her having a tearful conversation on the phone explaining her doubts and fears and you assume she’s confiding in a close friend but soon we discover she’s live with a radio station. I love how they did that too. The station opens the line up to callers and one man who seems to care and wants to help calls in. Judy agrees to meet him the next day downtown.

Upon arrival (He’s walking past her into the building and asks, “Are you Judy?” and when she says yes he’s surprised and says, “Am I late or are you early?” and she says, “Oh, I’m just a few hours early.” (These lines are so minimal but I think they do such a good job letting the viewer get a sense of who she is and how she thinks and feels, I thought a lot of her dialogue was really specific in this way and good).

When they turn to walk in we see on the door it’s an army recruitment center. In his office, she’s expressing trepidation and he keeps calmly shooting it down, saying, “Oh that’s how we used to do it, but it’s different now, this is the army of the 80’s!” and saying there are yachts and condos and she could get a desk job in Europe and they would take care of everything and if she didn’t like it she could just quit like any other job.

So she signs up, and gets on a bus to Biloxi, Mississippi. Once there she immediately finds out that it is nothing like what he said and she can’t quit, it’s for three years. This part I really appreciated because I have seen Tik Toks from people in the army doing a trend of, “What lies did your recruiter tell you” where it’s the youngest kids you can imagine in barracks saying how much an adult lied to them and that they regret signing up. They’re doing it in a joking way but it is so deeply sad and I appreciated how the movie portrayed army recruiters as predatory and dishonest. He heard her in tears on a radio show and capitalized on her sense of loss and uncertainty to push her into something she would have never normally done. And if you’re like, “He thought he was helping!” then why did he have to lie? You can help someone without getting them to sign a document under false pretenses. I think it’s true that the majority of the people in the army are people who were taken advantage of because they needed something. Be it a place to live, or money to pay for college, or an alternative to jail, etc. I think that’s disgusting and I think if you need to trick young people into joining to get members it shouldn’t exist.

A lot of politicians have let slip that if college was free the army would lose a huge percentage of recruits, as if that’s a bad thing to avoid but I think we should make life better for people so they aren’t forced into positions they didn’t really choose.

Anyway I was impressed the movie depicted it like that. Then she’s there and as you can imagine, she doesn’t fit in and doesn’t like it. She gets in trouble a lot, is tired, doesn’t get along with the other women, etc.

The turning point is one night I forget even what she did but she did something that her whole unit gets punished for, they have to march circles in the rain in the middle of the night and her supervisor calls her parents to get her. They have the paperwork drawn up ready to sign for her discharge but she doesn’t do it.

Her father gave her this big speech where he’s like, “Let’s not pretend anymore. You’re not smart and you can’t be trusted to make your own decisions. When we leave here, you’re not going to leave my side” and essentially says he’s going to dictate how she lives. She decides to stay which I thought was set up well, it made sense that she did, you also felt how bad it would have to be for her to willingly choose the army.

So then she has her “getting better” montage where she decides to really apply herself. And she does do better but not crazy, she’s still herself and she’s not better than most of the other people she’s just getting the hang of it and fitting in with her unit better and they become friends. The night before their graduation from basic training there’s a game between the entire camp that’s like capture the flag but with guns.

Benjamin leads her whole unit to victory through a mixture of luck and cleverness but in the process exposes an affair between a sergeant and a cadet who had been the favorite of her unit leader, Captain Doreen (Eileen Brennan who I loved in Clue), who was also sleeping with the sergeant. Captain Doreen takes it out on them and forces them to clean all night. They retaliate by sneaking into her bunk as she’s packing for a transfer and put blue dye in her shower head.

The graduation goes off without a hitch (unless you are Captain Doreen who is blue), and they are all getting their placements. Benjamin gets put in the Thornbirds, an elite unit of aerial fighters that’s so far only been men. She feels honored by the commander who seems to have taken a liking to her and taken her under his wing. She meets his wife and dog in a convoy and his wife congratulates her and says how special she must be, that her husband is an excellent judge of character, and Benjamin thanks him for believing in her. She trains with them for weeks and the time comes to jump out of a plane for the first time. They go up and she’s the last one out and she breaks down saying she can’t jump, that she’s afraid and embarrassed to say it, but scared to die.

He reassures her she doesn’t have to jump and she starts to calm down then he tries to rape her. She jumps out of the plane. On the ground he has initiated a transfer for her out of the country because he doesn’t want her “loose lipped insinuations to ruin his reputation.” She goes, “Insinuations? You mean rape.” Which I was so impressed she named! And the movie named!

Then she was allowed to pick where she went which I don’t think would happen in real life at all, but she picks France. On a night off all the girls went to a bar and she ran into old family friends who were sitting with a gynecologist from France. They ended up sleeping together and she has an orgasm and says, “Now I know what I’ve been faking all those years.” They part on good terms and he says to look him up if she’s ever in France. She looks him up and they start dating.

This was so well done to me, how they depicted the emotional abuse of this relationship. It starts off good, there are just minor things, he leaves her to clean up his dog’s mess when he has to play soccer, he won’t fire his maid who is bad and swears they’re not sleeping together even when Judy finds her necklace in bed, he points out a woman walking by and says, “That’s the hair color I was talking about” and then the next scene Judy’s hair is dyed, her days consist of running errands for him and staying home and he discourages any ideas she has of other things, etc.

Judy’s old supervisor Captain Doreen was also transferred to this base and has been spying on Judy. When she discovers her new boyfriend is a registered communist (he joined for a painter ex-girlfriend, Claire) she forces Judy to choose either the army or her boyfriend. Judy decides to marry him.

Leading up to the wedding there are more problems and fights but each time she is consoled and says “I know once we get married it’ll all be better.” The morning of the wedding he is late and she finds out he was with Claire. As they are being read their vows (all in French) she keeps looking over and seeing the groom as her ex-husband, father, and all the other people in her life that were controlling or dismissive. She breaks off the marriage, punches him in the face, and walks out. The credits roll as we follow her back walking down a long winding dirt road under a canopy of trees in her white dress.

I was impressed at how expansive the story was, and how subtle. There wasn’t a big speech where a character outlines all the emotional points or Judy numerates all the ways she’s changed, or explained what changed. She just leaves. I love that. And the husband definitely got shittier but I think movies are guilty of making all the bad people SO bad there’s no gray area when in real life people who are abusive are also sweet sometimes, that’s how they get people to stay for so long. By apologizing and groveling and saying it was a mistake or they lost their temper, etc. I think at the end he was guilty of that but I liked that it was pretty gradual and small shift. He makes her sign a prenup, something she and her second husband talked about never doing and I think in this felt like an echo of the recruiter pushing her to join under false pretenses, a man getting her to sign something she doesn’t really agree to.

There was also a scene where one of her army friends was at the wedding and was having a quiet moment alone before the groom showed up and she said, “I think you’d be better off without him, you seem not well” and I valued that honesty and it highlighted how Judy didn’t have anyone else in her life saying that to her. Her parents were just complaining about how far they came and how she’s failed before. She isn’t able to hear it in that moment but I still think it’s valuable to tell people if you see something that’s wrong.

Before joining the army Judy realized aloud that the week after her husband died was the only time she’d been alone since kindergarten. I think a lot of people are like that but don’t really identify it as something to be healed.

Something I’m working on in my own life is being alone and being still, having quiet moments with myself both with my thoughts but also without my thoughts, just being in the world and in my body with myself. I liked that this movie didn’t really have a lesson it pushed on me or the character, there wasn’t a nice ribbon at the end showing her eating a baguette in France with a dog writing in her journal or anything. It ends right in the middle of what in the beginning was her lowest moment, the end of a marriage, but this time she chose it and she’s happy.

The quiet symmetry of that is so beautiful and highlights her change in such an organic way that you can observe or not, appreciate or not. It felt almost zen and I was so blown away that a mainstream movie not that long ago was allowed to be this narratively grazing for lack of a better word. I feel like there’s so much emphasis on getting everything tight and formulaic and referential. “Lean” there’s a lot of talk of, “cutting the fat” in writing. I like the fat. This script has a lot of fat and I think the movie is better for it. I’m glad I saw it at this time in my life when I’m trying to figure out the kind of writer I am, and the kinds of things I want to make.

Beautiful movie. Also Goldie Hawn was the perfect casting because she’s so present and a large personality but understated. She’s funny but not a caricature, sexy, but not flawless or unreal.

Anyway, I loved this movie in a really unexpected way, a sleeper hit, not the 80’s Cadet Kelly I was expecting. 4.5/5 French communists, would masturbate again.