An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) * * * *

Directed by:  Taylor Hackford

Starring:  Richard Gere, Debra Winger, Louis Gossett, Jr., David Keith, David Caruso, Robert Loggia, Lisa Eilbacher, Lisa Blount

An Officer and a Gentleman is the story of how a Naval officer candidate learns to be both an officer and a gentleman with the help of a local woman he falls for and a stern, but not unfeeling drill sergeant.  From the outset, we are not entirely confident he can learn to be either.    Zack Mayo (Gere) is the son of a drunken career Navy man who enlists in order to give his life some direction.  But, as Drill Sergeant Foley (Gossett) puts it, "Why would a slick hustler like yourself want to sign up for this sort of abuse?"   Mayo says he wants to fly jets.   Foley doesn't buy that reason.   He is suspicious of Mayo's character, believing his selfishness will betray him and the country at the worst possible time.   

Zack is a complex guy; defensive and unable to express positive emotion well.    Because he grew up living from naval base to naval base, he learned to avoid connection with people.   He isn't an unpleasant man, but someone who keeps his emotional distance.   That changes when he meets a local factory worker named Paula (Winger).    He sees her as someone who can occupy his time on weekend passes, but she is able to touch his heart and elicit a change in him.   But, she is no pushover and is only able to handle Zack's standoffish behavior for so long.    

The other accelerating factor to Zack's changes is Sgt. Foley, who promises his class, "I will use every means necessary, fair or unfair, to trip you up.  To expose your weaknesses,"    Foley's professional standards are unrelenting and for good reason.    His job is to ensure the right people are in the cockpits of the Navy's planes.   Some members of the class clearly don't have what it takes.  Others like Casey Seeger (Eilbacher), try their hardest but can't seem to get over the hump.   Mayo can physically handle himself, but does he have the character to see things through?     A lesser movie would make Foley the heavy, but he is written and acted intelligently and makes it clear to us why he has to do what he does.    He maybe even feels for some of the candidates, but he must weed out the pretenders.    Gossett won a well-deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar as Foley and the best scenes in the movie involve his ever-evolving relationship with Mayo.   

Another intriguing subplot involves Zack's friend and fellow candidate Sid (Keith), a gregarious Oklahoman who falls in love with Paula's friend Lynette (Blount), who is willing to trap him with a pregnancy scare to get him to marry her and take her away from her humdrum existence.     Sid is deceived into thinking she loves him and he makes a decision which reveals the truth of their relationship and also its consequences.      Winger received an Oscar nomination for her work.    She is spirited, believes in Zack, and willing to risk losing him so he can find out who he is.   Her chemistry with Gere is not the strongest, but maybe that is part of their characters.   They approach either cautiously and with preconceived notions about the other, which are slowly broken down.    Maybe a mite too slowly, but there is a powerful payoff. 

Richard Gere's best performances are those in which he is a slickster on the outside while hiding great emotional hurts underneath.     At times, we sense Zack would rather die than expose his soft side.     He learns to eventually reconcile this and it comes near the end, when he realizes that after graduating from basic training, he has no one there waiting to congratulate him.    His body language says it all.    This leads to the famed ending, in which we see Zack and Paula together and he smiles widely for the first time in the movie.     It was a long journey for him to get to that smile, one which we were happy to witness.