‘Boots’ Review: Netflix’s Gay Marines Dramedy Is an Odd, Entertaining Mix of Discrimination Exposé and Recruitment Ad
From pre-school to grad school, I’ve been voted Least Likely to Enlist in the Marines at every academic institution I’ve ever attended. So consider how peculiar it felt to watch Netflix‘s new eight-part coming-of-age dramedy Boots and to have pondered, more than once, “You know, maybe it would have been worthwhile to have been a Marine” — or at least to have gone through basic training on something other than the latest content management system or innovation in search engine optimization.
Adapted by Andy Parker from Greg Cope White’s memoir, The Pink Marine (a much better title), and representing what may now be the final executive producing credit for the late Norman Lear, Boots makes the United States Marine Corps look like a pressure cooker plagued by homophobia, sexism and racism. But for all of those unpleasant aspects, the series’ ultimate concentration is on the Marines as a worthy organization devoted to helping mostly young men learn discipline, honor and the proper mechanics for a pull-up.
Far more of a recruitment ad than I would have expected given the log-line, Boots is the sort of show that actual Marines and random conservatives only interested in the military as an opportunity to complain about “wokeness” will whine about, sight-unseen — only to discover, upon watching, that the series is almost uncomfortably reverential at times. Boots exceeded my very limited threshold for bellowed paeans to guns and for seemingly abusive and hate-filled characters who turn out to be admirable and even heroic under the revealing glare of “brotherhood,” without any earned narrative legwork or character evolution. But I generally found the series to be smartly written and well-performed by a likable young cast with several potential breakouts.
Miles Heizer plays Cameron Cope, a well-traveled teen whose high-school experience was marred by bullying, a tentative understanding of his homosexuality and the behavior of his flighty mother (Vera Farmiga‘s Barbara).
When his best friend — only friend — Ray (Liam Oh) leaves the Air Force Academy and enlists in the Marines, Cameron learns about the buddy system guaranteeing that friends who enlist together can do basic training together. With no other evident options, Cameron enlists and, after quickly telling and being ignored by his mother, he’s off to Parris Island.
Oh, did I mention that it’s 1990? It is! And that’s relevant, though not necessarily in the ways you expect it to be, though it establishes the context in which being openly gay is wholly verboten.
In short order, Cameron is having his head shaved and being yelled at by various drill sergeants and staff sergeants whose individual titles I won’t try to parse, led by McKinnon (Cedrick Cooper) and Howitt (Nicholas Logan). When a third drill sergeant is removed from Cameron’s platoon after an incident, the company commander (Ana Ayora’s Captain Fajardo) assigns Sergeant Sullivan (Max Parker), a decorated combat veteran, to the unit. Sullivan, who has secrets that are instantly obvious but still embargoed, is particularly harsh toward Cameron.
Cameron struggles with basic training. He has limited upper body strength, questionable stamina and he can’t poop in a bathroom without individual stalls. Slowly, he begins to know the other young men in his platoon, including bunkie Ochoa (Jonathan Nieves), who won’t shut up about his wife; differently out-of-shape Bowman (Blake Burton), who’s stuck in the shadow of his twin brother (Brandon Tyler Moore); wildly eccentric Hicks (Angus O’Brien); politically ambitious Nash (Dominic Goodman); and scarily intense Slovacek (Kieron Moore).
The eight-episode first season has an easily accessible episodic structure courtesy of the duration of basic training. Each episode is built around a benchmark task that Cameron and his fellow recruits go through, from a week mastering an ambitious obstacle course to another dealing with various water-based challenges to much-anticipated firearms training to the climactic Crucible, bringing together everything they’ve learned.
Tonally, the writers (with Jennifer Cecil joining Parker as showrunner) and directors (The Last of Us Emmy nominee Peter Hoar handled the pilot) let Cameron’s perspective drive the series. His initial ignorance and lack of preparedness for this experience yield a blend of humorous incredulity and nightmarish terror, but the series and Cameron become more earnest as the objectives of basic training go from alien to real to aspirational and then inspirational, with a detour into a dark and cynical seriousness toward the end.
Cameron introduces the show with one of those “You’re probably wondering how I got here” narrations, in which he’s able to play around with the conventions of the storytelling, interject jokes and insights and contribute meta touches, but that’s done with by the end of the pilot. The presence of an alter-ego I simply called “Other Cameron” serves a somewhat similar purpose, giving Cameron the chance to have on-screen conversations with himself, though it’s inconsistently applied and I never understood the rules of when Cameron and Other Cameron were interacting and what the root of Other Cameron’s personality was. Additional humor comes from a very broad Farmiga, but the series forgets that Barbara exists for long stretches and rarely benefits from her presence.
Cameron’s centrality lets the persecution of gay Marines remain in the foreground and complicates the expressed mission of the Marines — how can an organization help you become the “you” you’re meant to be if the “you” you truly are is prohibited? — but the series is less successful at building it all into a coherent thesis. McKinnon is Black, leading to a mention of the Montford Point Marines and the institution’s history of long-delayed racial integration, but nothing is done there. That Capt. Fajardo is a woman lets her acknowledge that she’s smashing through a long-standing barrier, but nothing is really done there either. The point seems to be that progress is slow in coming to the Marines, but they get there eventually. It’s an oddly live-and-let-live attitude in a show that wants to be both “Discrimination is bad!” and “The Marines is/are good!” all at once.
The series is playful and heavily referential one moment — similarities to Full Metal Jacket are acknowledged and acknowledged again — and then tries to sell serious and highly emotional beats the next, occasionally with success and occasionally with jarring distraction. Some characters get flashbacks and backstories and then disappear for the rest of the series, making me wonder if the fragmentation of the storyline actually offered meaningful advantages.
Boots may jump around in time, but thanks to Heizer, the season’s arc plays out very clearly. Heizer is 31, and has long been playing high school students and playing them well, going back 15 years to Parenthood and then to 13 Reasons Why. He makes Cameron believably uncomfortable and unformed at first, and he undergoes a transition that’s physical and represented in his growing confidence as basic training makes him sharper and more assertive, even if there are bumps along the way. It’s a very good performance, boosted by the opportunity to act opposite the Other Cameron version of himself at times.
Film and television have made drill sergeant parts into kibble for any actor with an affinity for shouting and strained neck muscles. Parker, one of several cast members to never fully shake their obvious Britishness, is probably the overall standout, scary one scene and heartbreaking the next. Logan, who comes across as an even more fervent Barry Pepper, is the most convincing of the actors left to sell characters who say and do reprehensibly offensive things but turn out to be decent people.
In a top-to-bottom well-cast ensemble, Goodman, O’Brien, Moore, Joshua Jones as a late-arriving recruit who has things in common with Cameron, and Rico Paris as another late-arriving recruit with the redundant name of “Santos Santos” all make strong impressions.
There are stretches when Boots threatens to drown under the weight of its oft-repeated Marine chants, jargon and sloganeering; when its desire to prove its research and sincere interest in not slandering the Marines gets in the way of its storytelling; when you lose track of which scenes are intentional homages to prior cinematic depictions of military training and which are just leaning on clichés. I’d also be wary of expecting too much “comedic” from this “comedic drama.” And while there are some very distinctive visuals, mining from scenes of individual heroism through the muddy rigors of the process, there’s nothing here that can rise to the aesthetic level of the iconic “The Few, The Proud, The Marines” ads that were ubiquitous on television in the ’80s and ’90s.
Still, it’s a familiar story, well-told, even if my own regret at never having experienced the masculinity-shaping gauntlet of becoming a jarhead was very fleeting.
