‘Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?’ Review: War Trauma Drama Misfire

Throughout much of one-man-band director Shinya Tsukamoto’s solemn trauma drama Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?, viewers outside of Japan may be asking themselves a different question than the one posed by the title: “Why,” they might wonder, “did a Japanese filmmaker known for cultish genre flicks like Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Tokyo Fist decide to make a movie about an African American U.S. Marine wrecked by his experience during the Vietnam War?”

It takes most of the film for us to learn the answer, which is in fact rather simple and is definitely not a spoiler: The script was adapted from the titular nonfiction account of Allen Nelson, a Vietnam vet who managed to overcome severe PTSD and eventually became a popular speaker in Japan, giving over 1,200 talks about the brutalities he committed during his tours of duty in Nam. In his director’s statement, Tsukamoto explains that he attended one of those lectures, which exposed him to the horrors of war and changed his outlook on violence.  

The sincerity of Tsukamoto’s endeavor — which again has him writing, directing, shooting and editing the entire movie himself — is evident in this forthright take on Nelson’s story, which oscillates between unsparing scenes of wartime atrocities and clumsy bits of family drama brought on by the soldier’s psychological episodes, which finally begin to ease after intensive therapy. Powerful in spots and overwrought in others, Mr. Nelson sits uneasily between two genres, the war-sploitation flick and the on-the-nose afterschool special, never quite managing to reconcile one with the other.

Told through a flashbacking structure that cuts between Nelson as a father (veteran stage actor Rodney Hicks) dealing with severe shell shock and his horrific experience as a young marine (promising newcomer Mark Merphy) carrying out acts of violence against enemy fighters and civilians, the schematically told story suggests that psychotherapy may be the only way out of such a quagmire. This comes in the form of regular, sometimes punishing sessions between Nelson and Dr. Neil Daniels (Geoffrey Rush), who forces the former soldier to dig deep into his experiences in the jungle, as well as into a childhood marked by poverty and abuse.

The first half of the film follows Nelson as he joins the Marines, suffers through months of basic training and is then sent off to fight in a war he doesn’t know much about. Part of a platoon consisting primarily of Black soldiers, he receives a baptism of fire when several of them are gunned down by the Viet Cong during an ambush. From then on, the squad is ordered to enact vicious revenge on any village they come across, massacring farmers, women and children in order to thwart the enemy, though sometimes they seem to be doing it out of pure sadism.

Tsukamoto makes those scenes difficult to watch, sticking close to Nelson as the new recruit witnesses, and then participates in — first unwillingly and then quite eagerly — acts that wind up shattering his soul. Heavy on gore and human suffering, the war sequences are deliberately excessive, making Mr. Nelson one of the more gruesome depictions of what went down in Vietnam since Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War, which employed a similar flashbacking narrative to portray rape and other crimes committed by members of the U.S. military.     

Those upsetting passages are intercut with Nelson’s ceaseless struggles back on the home front, where he’s unable to cope with all of his terrifying memories, lashing out at his wife (Tatyana Ali of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air fame) and children a few too many times. Tsukamoto is less at ease in those moments of domestic drama, which have a stagy heavy-handedness compared to the visceral feel of the Vietnam-set scenes, even if they serve to illustrate how far Nelson had truly come by the time he got better.

The arc of Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? — whose title is evoked during a scene in which the emotionally battered soldier does a Q&A session with an elementary school class — ultimately bends toward greater self-awareness, especially after Dr. Daniels forces his patient to look beyond his duties as a Marine toward other traumas from his past. But there’s a lack of subtlety to both the film’s message and the way it’s handled that doesn’t always serve Nelson’s inspirational true story, making it lose some of its staying power.