Jeremy’s Tophunder №2: A Few Good Men

9 min readApr 25, 2020

My best friend is a guy named Charlie.

I say he’s my best friend, but really, I can hardly stand him. It’s just that we’ve known each other for so long that we can’t help but continue to be friends, despite the fact that neither of us really like each other that much. You know how old friendships can be.

Charlie and I have known each other since elementary school, and we were always friendly growing up and all through high school, but we didn’t become super-super close until after college. Our friendship was forged when we were recent graduates with no real job prospects — he was a bartender, I worked as a floor manager at a grocery store. We were both living at home, so nearly 100 percent of our income went towards alcohol and trips to the movie theater.

I can’t tell you how many movies Charlie and I have seen together over the years, but I’d hazard a guess that it’s close to 150. It seemed like we went to the movies together at least once a week for the better part of two years. Some of my favorite experiences at the movies were going out with Charlie on a Friday or Saturday night, having five or six too many cocktails, then stumbling into a midnight showing of whatever garbage movie we could think of, and proceeding to heckle the movie as much as we could in the otherwise empty theater. On at least one occasion we actually got other audience members to join in.

I’m not sure exactly what Charlie’s Tophunder list would look like, but I know that A Few Good Men would be near the top. It’s a movie we reference constantly with each other, particularly the scene in the bar where Tom Cruise goes to tell Kevin Bacon that his key witness finally turned up. The number of times that one of us has chosen to say “I have Markinson” in place of “Hello” is well into the hundreds. The number of times one of us has yelled across a crowded room “You’re a lousy fucking softball player, Jack!” probably exceeds that number by a factor of 10. I know Charlie’s favorite line happens to be Kevin Bacon’s “I represent the government of the United States without passion or prejudice, and my client has a case.” It’s a great scene from a great movie, and I’m glad that I’ve gotten to share it with my friend over the last however many years.

So why do I bring all of this up?

Charlie was supposed to get married today. He’s been engaged to his lovely fiancee, Laura, for almost two years now, and they were supposed to be spending the day exchanging nuptials in Plymouth, MA this afternoon. Obviously, due to all of the restrictions on social gatherings that have been set forth, that’s not happening anymore. Luckily, they’ve been able to re-schedule their wedding for later this year, but on what I’m sure isn’t the kind of day he’d prefer to be having, I figured I’d give my friend an early wedding present and talk about a movie that we both love.

What I really love about A Few Good Men more than anything is how simple it seems, even though it’s not. On some level, you might even be able to describe it as a goof on an action movie, even though most of the movie takes place in a courtroom. Most action movies have a simple, straightforward script and dazzling visuals. A Few Good Men has a dazzling script and simple, straightforward visuals. And there’s a reason for that.

Rob Reiner is one of the more interesting directors to study, because of how well he works with great writers. His most famous directorial efforts are here, along with When Harry Met Sally, The Princess Bride, Misery, and This Is Spinal Tap. In other words, he’s best known for directing the work of Aaron Sorkin, Nora Ephron, William Goldman, and Christopher Guest (in other words, three people on the short list for best screenwriter of the last half-century, and one of the most renowned improvisers in movie history).

He had a distinct visual direction for A Few Good Men. He effectively said, “we have a great stable of movie stars reading from a great script, let’s just point the cameras at them and start rolling.” The movie doesn’t take any visual risks because it doesn’t have to, and what you get is a simple but incredibly effective visual aesthetic. It’s almost like how Phil Jackson won 11 NBA titles as more of a spiritual guide than a basketball coach. He knew that his teams were loaded with talent, so the most likely way for him to screw it up would be getting too hands-on. Obviously, it’s not quite that simple in either example, but Reiner deserves a lot of credit here (and throughout of his career) for staying out of the way.

A Few Good Men is Tom Cruise at his absolute best. Cruise is one of my favorite actors of all time, appearing in five movies on my list (with several others serving as honorable mentions), but he’s never been better than he was here. He’s young, energetic, charming, funny, sarcastic, and goes toe-to-toe in two scenes with Jack Nicholson, and might actually win both of them. It’s not his most iconic role (that would be either Top Gun or Risky Business), it’s not his most culturally pervasive role (that would be Ethan Hunt from the Mission: Impossible series), and it’s not his best dramatic role (that’s probably Jerry Maguire, or possibly Magnolia), but somehow, it’s the role where he really put everything together and reached his full potential. With Cruise, I’m never quite sure if what I call his best acting is actually good acting or if it’s just him at his Cruise-y-est, but here I actually think he has his true A-game.

As good as Cruise is, Jack Nicholson might even be better. He’s only in four scenes and is only on screen for about 10 or 12 minutes, but somehow dominates the movie. If we’re ranking acting performances by a metric based on how impactful they are to the movie despite very little screen time, the early-mid 90s dominate the category, with Nicholson here competing with Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs and Kevin Spacey in Seven. (Other nominees probably include The Wicked Witch of The West, Hal Holbrook in All The President’s Men, Marlin Brando in Apocalypse Now, and Matt Damon in Euro Trip.)

My favorite story from this movie is from the filming of Nicholson’s iconic monologue. You already know what it is. While they were filming it, they obviously had to film Nicholson in a few different shots, plus they had to film the reverse shots — the reactions of Cruise, Kevin Bacon, Demi Moore, the judge, the jurors, and on and on down the line. Most of those shots didn’t end up in the final cut of the film, but they still had to film them. The problem is, it’s a rather long monologue, and they had a lot of coverage to shoot. Often what will happen in situations like this is that the actor (Nicholson) will simply take off for the day once all of the shots with him in it are completed, and the coverage shots will be done with a script supervisor or assistant director standing in for the speaking actor. What happened here is that Nicholson stuck around for several 12–14 hour days of shooting, when he wasn’t even being filmed, and according to literally everyone involved in the production, delivered the speech with just as much intensity and condescension as you see in the final cut. Reiner went to Nicholson and told him that, while it was certainly appreciated, he didn’t need to be going to all of this effort. Nicholson simply replied, “Robby, I love to act.”

It’s one of my favorite Nicholson performances. His career was kind of in a lull following a few duds in the late 80s and early 90s, but this performance put him back on the map for sure. It was his best performance since The Shining, and almost certainly his best performance of the last 40 years.

I have a love/hate relationship with Aaron Sorkin. I think he’s a brilliant writer, but I also recognize that his works often have some noticeable flaws. For one, he doesn’t write female characters very well. For another, whenever he’s involved with a TV show, it tends to get rather preachy over the course of it’s run. For as much as I love The West Wing (and as much as I love to hate The Newsroom), I think Sorkin’s best work comes in film. A format where he’s limited to about two hours of work just doesn’t leave enough time for his characters to become too full of themselves and grandiose, and when they do (like Nicholson here), it actually works, because we only see them that way.

Television is more of a writer’s medium (as serial storytelling is often emphasized over visual creativity), and in many ways, contemporary TV writers have caught up to how Sorkin constructed his shows. That hasn’t happened with movies, though. Sure, Sorkin’s plot structure is usually rather simple (but not boring), but his dialogue remains largely unmatched among contemporary Hollywood screenwriters. He has said multiple times that some of his inspirations come from his childhood, going to see plays on Broadway that he was far too young to fully understand. But he would listen to the dialogue, and even though he didn’t understand what exactly was going on, it sounded like music to him.

Watch the scene where a drunk Tom Cruise argues about whether or not he should put Colonel Jessup on the stand, or the scene where Jack Ross offers the two marines on trial the best deal that they’ll get, or my personal favorite, Cruise’s first scene where he negotiates a plea deal while hitting softballs (sadly, there’s no reliable video link), and you can start to see how Sorkin’s dialogue is almost musical. It bops back and forth between characters, they repeat lines back to each other, and every scene slowly builds to a crescendo. It’s often loaded with seemingly random but hyper-specific examples, and often heavy on jargon. The jargon piece I find especially interesting, because it almost seems like Sorkin is doing to us what the Broadway shows did to him in his youth — we don’t fully understand all the jargon, but it sounds really cool when they say it.

A Few Good Men is a rather predictable story (save for Cruise and Demi Moore’s character -not- becoming romantically involved, a refreshing twist), but following the predictable story is actually incredibly engaging, thanks to both the spectacular performances delivered by just about all of the major actors (Moore isn’t at her best but it’s easy enough to ignore thanks to everyone else) and Sorkin’s dialogue, which is just so much fun. The climax has become one of the most iconic scenes in movie history, and the resolution is satisfying, but just the right amount of bittersweet. It spins together some of my favorite movie elements, from Sorkin’s writing to Cruise and Nicholson to a procedural courtroom drama, and it’s been among my favorite movies for as long as I can remember.

Charlie’s favorite movies often involve cops, the military, intelligence agencies, or other arenas where the good guys track down the bad guys, and authority is respected and/or subverted. I think his dream would be for 1992 Harrison Ford to be placed in suspended animation in order to pump out Tom Clancy and/or John Grisham adaptations every 18 months. To be honest, I wouldn’t much mind that, either. I suspect that we have some overlap on our Tophunder lists, but not a ton. However, I have to assume that if there’s any move that both of us rank this high, it’s A Few Good Men.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One