The General's Daughter (1999)

The General's Daughter arrives at the end of the 1990s as a murder mystery set on a Georgia army base, where Captain Elisabeth Campbell is found staked naked on the training ground in a pose the film regards with the reverence normally reserved for fine china. Two warrant officers are dispatched to investigate. The procedural that follows keeps mistaking titillation for gravity, and it does so at length.

There is a real argument buried in here about sex discrimination in the ranks. Several generals persuaded a gang-raped cadet to stay silent because publicity would damage the cause of women in uniform, and the cover-up that follows is genuinely damning. The film also lingers on the same material with a leering camera, fetish videotapes, and a strangling scene that left Roger Ebert feeling unclean. The indictment and the exploitation occupy the same frame, and the exploitation wins on points.

Elsewhere the picture keeps its head down. Race is never a subject; the Black supporting players appear as ordinary soldiers with no comment attached. There is no environmental conscience, no eat-the-rich sentiment, since the villain is the institution and not the portfolio. The body is treated as evidence and as scenery, never as anything to affirm. Trauma drives the plot without being framed as identity. A female co-lead and a few minority faces give the cast a mild breadth that the film never advertises. The finale reaches for a moral reckoning over military cronyism, then proposes nothing beyond a court-martial and a plane ride. The last word belongs to spectacle. Ebert's instinct was sound.

That is the correct response to this material: a sincere grievance, dressed up and then undressed again, sold as a thriller and remembered mostly for the undressing. The classification is straightforward, though not flattering. A serious subject does not a serious film make, and this one has the nerve to raise a genuine injustice while keeping its eye trained firmly on the corpse.