Heaven and Earth
Le Ly (Hiep Thi Le) lives in a small Vietnamese village whose serenity is shattered when war breaks out. As a freedom fighter, a hustler, young mother, a sometime prostitute, and the wife of a US. marine, her relationships with men suggests an analogy of Vietnam as Woman and the U.S. as Man.
8 October 1944, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, USA
17 September 1962, Saigon, South Vietnam [now Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam]
28 September 1946, Buffalo, New York, USA
1958, Nha-Trang, Vietnam
24 December 1973, Hawaii, USA
28 September 1942, Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA
18 February 1971, Da Nang, Vietnam
May1960, Dayton, Ohio, USA
1 April 1932, El Paso, Texas, USA
12 September 1960, Washington Heights, New York, USA
1 February 1952, Arlington, Texas, USA
March 16, 2002
Touches the heart not only as a cross-cultural treasure but as Oliver Stone's most soulful movie.
June 05, 2004
Mr. Stone tells this tale vigorously, but he has the wrong cinematic vocabulary for his heroine's essentially passive experience.
September 20, 2016
...despite every intention the movie can't quite shake its American male point of view.
January 01, 2000
Stone has a keen directorial eye, and Heaven and Earth is usually interesting to watch.
November 21, 2004
What Oliver Stone has created is his Mrs. Miniver for the Vietnam era.
March 13, 2015
Some of the parts are undeniably gripping; what gets lost are the characters themselves.
November 16, 2001
Heaven has so many themes, ranging from Buddhist spirituality to feminism, it ends up with none.
October 16, 2004
Overblown, forgettable Oliver Stone epic.
October 30, 2001
This is the first time [Stone] has tried to place himself inside a woman's imagination, and that he succeeds so well is due partly...to an extraordinary performance by Hiep Thi Le in the leading role.
January 01, 2000
I found this story moving and at times wrenching...Oliver Stone has made his best film about Vietnam.
October 30, 2001
Heaven and Earth has the epic scope one would expect from a film of this magnitude, but it lacks much of the narrative strength of Stone's first two Vietnamese tales.
