Gardens of Stone

Gardens of Stone (1987) — watch online on iFILM — is Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam War drama set not in the jungle but at Arlington National Cemetery. Sergeant Clell Hazard serves in the Old Guard, the Army's ceremonial unit that buries the dead with full honors. He has folded too many flags. He wants to go back to war and can't.

James Caan plays Hazard as a man ground down by the gap between where he is and where he wants to be. When Jackie Willow (D.B. Sweeney) — the son of a fallen friend — arrives in his unit, Hazard mentors him the only way he knows: preparing him for the war that keeps claiming the men they bury. Anjelica Huston plays a pacifist journalist whose relationship with Hazard turns the film's moral question personal. James Earl Jones, Laurence Fishburne, and Dean Stockwell round out the cast.

Coppola made the film while grieving his own son Gian-Carlo, who died in an accident during production. That grief is in every frame. It's a quiet, bitter film about duty, ritual, and the soldiers who bury other soldiers while wishing they could trade places with the living. Watch Gardens of Stone (1987) online on iFILM.