It Is That Hard To Make An Apolitical Movie Without Politics?

In my entire lifetime, I would have been content without seeing any Tom Cruise movies. Being a film critic does have some drawbacks.
I have always thought of Tom Cruise as a hopelessly romantic actor- romantic in the sense of Jane Austin rather than Fabio. His acting is rich and crowd pleasing, but so is Mrs. Buttersworth and she is no less syrupy. Even in his most emotional moments, I always feel like I am watching a figure skater perform, it can be beautiful, but still showy. Perhaps I am being overly critical, but I just can’t warm myself to an actor who is supposedly still wearing those underwear from “Risky Business.”
His performance in “Born on the Fourth of July” is an entirely different story, one in which he plays Ron Kovic, a real-life Vietnam vet.
Ever since he was little, Ron couldn’t wait to become one of the war heroes he idolized marching(or being wheeled) in the Fourth of July Parade. In a small town where the greatest thing a person could do was serve their country, a boy who always wanted to be his best could only learn life’s lessons the hard way.
And so he joins the Marines and goes to fight in Vietnam. He soon learns that going to war is not the glorious deed he was brought up to believe it was. He begins to question his morals, religion, and particularly his humanity. Ron was fully prepared, as many were, to die for his country; but what he hadn’t considered was his haunted life after the war.
He returns home in a wheelchair, the decorated hero he wanted to become, but paralyzed from the chest down. He is confused and out of place in a country that is revolting against him and a body that is just as tormented. He is angry and frustrated, feeling that he has lost everything that made him a man.
The psychological anguish and physically inhibited fury that Cruise’s character demands is unequivocally challenging, and he meets it with fervor. For a man who has absolutely nothing left in life to hold on to, why does he go on living? Cruise understands that through all Ron goes through, he never loses his desire to make something of himself.
“Born on the Fourth of July” is a very good movie, but it is not great. In what is almost a perfect story about triumph of the spirit, the plot makes a decidedly political turn. Ron pulls himself up from almost complete self-destruction and takes on a completely new outlook on life. But instead of being about human transformation, the story looks rather one-sidedly upon a man’s painful transformation from a conservative to a liberal.
But what I believe the film was trying to ask is, who is right when everyone is wrong? When it comes to that, you know it is time to question your humanity.