More than a Few Good Men

What Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson taught me about being a man.

Tom Cruise delivers a four-word line at the end of A Few Good Men that brings me to tears every single time.

No, not that line. Not the one where Tom stands tall (so to speak) in his Navy officer uniform and demands “I want the truth!” and Jack Nicholson fumes back: “You can’t handle the truth!” That’s a pretty damn good moment—iconic, even. If you love The Social Network as much as I do and The West Wing as much as my wife does—if you appreciate anything Aaron Sorkin has given us since—you have that moment to thank for it.

But that’s not the moment that makes me cry. I’m thinking of an exchange between Cruise and Nicholson that happens a few moments later. Nicholson’s character, Colonel Nathan Jessup, admits he committed a crime and is promptly arrested. He lunges at Cruise’s Daniel Kaffee and spits out a vulgar threat involving removing Kaffe’s head and defecating down his throat. Jessup is restrained by the court officers. He collects himself, stands up straight, and glares at Kaffee one last time.

Kaffee has won, but Jessup is about to undermine his sense of victory.

“All you did was weaken a country, Kaffee,” Jessup says. “You put people’s lives in danger. Sweet dreams, son.”

And then Kaffee says this: “Don’t call me son. I’m a lawyer and an officer in the United States Navy. And you’re under arrest, you son of a bitch.”

Then I wipe away my tears. Don’t call me son. Gets me every time.

Earlier in A Few Good Men, we learn that Daniel Kaffee is living in the shadow of his father. Papa Kaffee has died seven years earlier, and he left behind a formidable legacy as a legendary trial lawyer, former U.S. Attorney General, and most importantly, a man of principle. As a judge earlier in his career, he’d ordered a school in Mississippi to desegregate.

Kaffee’s daddy issues are the key subtext to his whole persona—the script is sprinkled with references to his dad. Kaffee is cocky but cowardly, committed to a life of mediocre lawyering. Why bother trying? He knows he’ll never live up to his father’s legacy.

As the story develops, the key question is whether Kaffee will get serious enough and brave enough to stand up to Lt. Jessup. To take that step, he first has to take an even bigger one—stepping out from his father’s shadow and taking a chance at being his own man.

The great Roger Ebert hated A Few Good Men, calling it “one of those movies that tells you what it’s going to do, does it, and then tells you what it did.” He’s not wrong about that. We learn in the third act that the only way for Kaffee to win the case—the only way for the movie to reach its climax—is to put Jessup on the stand. That means putting his entire career on the line because, we’re told, if Jessup won’t admit his crime, Kaffee will be disbarred … or something. (That part doesn’t really add up.) So Kaffee decides he’s going to put Jessup on the stand and try to get him to confess.

Kaffee doesn’t decide to do this just because he figures out it’s the right thing to do. He knows all along it’s the right thing to do. He does it because his friend, Sam, helps him see that taking a big risk is the only way he’ll ever be his own man:

DANIEL

Would you put Jessup on the stand?

SAM

Nope.

DANIEL

Do you think my father would have?

SAM

With the evidence we got? Not in a million years. But here’s the thing, and there’s really no getting around this: Neither Lionel Kaffee nor Sam Weinberg are lead counsel… So there's really only one question: What would you do?

This exchange comes just before the big, famous “You can’t handle the truth” climax. Kaffee’s confrontation of Jessup is only possible because he finally achieves separation from his father, which also frees him from the false authority of father figures. He is not his father. But he is also not anyone else’s son. He is his own man.

Don’t call me son.

When I set out to write a fatherhood memoir, I knew I’d have to wrestle through my dad’s story. His shadow was long, and I’d spent decades trying to escape it. It took me almost two years to write about him, and when I finally finished, I was glad to move on to a planned Part 2 on father figures. I figured that writing about my father figures would be easy, even fun.

It was anything but. Replacement dads were just another casting of my father’s shadow. The more I thought about it, the more I realized just how much of my life I’d been trying to turn myself into someone else’s son. A few good men? More like many men of all kinds, good, bad, and in between. I’d been figuring myself into a son of men my whole life through—every male authority figure, whether benevolent or baneful, was a potential father figure. My relationship with older men of all kinds was bound up in my tendency to see them as dad-like—and therefore both exactly the thing I wanted and exactly the thing I feared.

I spent most of another year sorting all this out. One reason that A Few Good Men scene makes me cry is that it was while watching that movie randomly one Saturday afternoon that all this began to become clear to me. (Thanks, Aaron Sorkin.)

People have to break from their parents. They have to leave their shadow. But on the way out, sometimes they just look for other shadows, often more shadowy shadows. And they have to escape those shadows, too. Their lives need to turn from asking What would my father do? to asking What would I do? Only then can they see their way clear to put their core dilemma on the stand and demand the truth.