While I had never seen the movie Private Benjamin before this week, I do have some vague recollections of the short-lived TV version running in syndicated reruns from time to time during my childhood. I’d see enough of those to know what I thought was the basic gist of the movie: wealthy socialite Judy Benjamin for some reason joined the army and managed to come out on top despite her incredibly unorthodox ways. Heck, the show even had Eileen Brennan and Hal Williams reprise their roles from the movie. But that was about all I knew aside from maybe seeing a scene or two while flipping channels.
It turns out there’s a bit more to the movie than that, and not just because lead actress Goldie Hawn got her name above the title in the opening credits.
Judy Benjamin (Hawn) is having a bad time of it. An opening crawl says her childhood dream was to marry a professional man, have a nice house, a couple maids, and never really need to worry about money or work for the rest of her life. And she did get that by marrying Yale Goodman (Albert Brooks). Then he upped and died of a sudden heart attack during on their wedding night during sex. Depressed, Judy is talked into joining the army by a smooth-talking recruiter (Harry Dean Stanton) who knows exactly what to say to get her to sign up for a three year stint, right up to the promise that, like any job, she can quit if she doesn’t like it. Obviously that isn’t going to happen, a notion quickly squashed primarily by her company commander, Captain Doreen Lewis (Brennan). Judy has problems in the Army. She isn’t particularly physically fit, some of the women in her unit don’t really like her very much and let her know as much very quickly, and the discipline needed isn’t something she seems to possess. Then the darnedest thing happens: after a botched attempt to make a run for it, her parents come up and Captain Lewis, suddenly acting very nice, offers Judy a way out if she’ll just sign some papers. And Judy, seeing how her parents have bailed her out of everything she’s ever done and changed her mind about, how two-faced Lewis is being, and not really caring much for how her father criticizes the Army and every decision Judy has ever made up until that point, changes her mind, buckles down, and gets a whole lot better in the process.
Now, up until this point, the movie is very much a standard “clueless person joins the military” movie with the expected slapstick of said person failing miserably at everything she has to do, but then gets better. For example, when Judy and her newfound soldier friends win at company wargames after Captain Lewis basically assigned them to guard a swamp, it plays out a lot like how the Dirty Dozen did it themselves once upon a time, and that was a much more serious movie. Judy’s blundering weren’t that much different from any number of comedic characters going through basic training, but then the movie opted to do things a bit differently. Let’s just say Abbot and Costello never had to worry about being sexually assaulted by a superior officer.
From there, the movie changes tact and becomes more about how much better and more indepedent a person Judy is as a result of her time in the Army. Assigned to Belgium, she hits it off with a wealthy French doctor (Armand Assante), and what follows from there shows Judy is someone who will now make her own decisions. Henri is a great catch for her at first, but as she spends more and more time with him, she sees the flaws, and she isn’t necessarily afraid to stand up to her own superiors when Lewis, transferred to the same station Judy is in, identifies Henri as a communist (he was for like a minute apparently, but this was 1980 after all). As such, the movie is less about Judy floundering around while in the army a la Bill Murray in Stripes but instead is about Judy just realizing she shouldn’t be relying on others to achieve her own dreams. Or even realizing she can have some of her own and beyond wanting someone to take care of her. That’s actually a much different message than the one I was expecting, honestly.
It helps that Hawn is so likeable and Brennan makes such a deliciously nasty opponent, all smiles when she needs to be but quick to bring down the hammer when she feel humiliated. Hawn, perhaps that rarest of the rare as a comedy star treated like a sex symbol, pouts in an adorable way before finding a spine, and when Judy Benjamin decides she’s had enough, well, she can walk away on her own and not just get her daddy to fix things for her. As much as the first act or so of the movie seems rather rote and predictable for the genre, the conclusion seems to come from a different movie, and it made Private Benjamin stand out all the better for it.
Grade: B+
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