Channeling films like “Catch-22” and “Three Kings”, the black comedy of “Buffalo Soldiers” seeks to sketch the problems inherent in the life of the professional soldier, that creature of contradictions who, as Joker in “Full Metal Jacket” has it, was “born to kill”. A film of this type hangs its helmet on transcending its particularities to get to the heart of the matter of soldiering and war-making. The weightless despair in “M.A.S.H.”, say, uncovers for us not only the buried anguish in the 4077th but of the Korean War as a whole, and of war in general. And it is no coincidence that “M.A.S.H.” followed on the heels of Vietnam, just as it is no coincidence that “Buffalo Soldiers” comes in the midst of war in Afghanistan and Iraq (released now despite being finished in 2001, just before September 11). Inferences are made by dramatic juxtaposition: the sober truth of war emerges only in its madness.

In “Buffalo Soldiers”, commentary on the military rarely rises above the exceedingly facile, such as the opening image of a platoon marching over Old Glory painted on concrete. Yes, the soldiers make war on themselves, that much is clear. Yes, besides the laws of the marketplace, the base seems plunged in anarchy. Men die at an alarming rate for a peacetime operation—McCovey cracks his skull playing football, two soldiers are blown up in a ‘gas station incident’, another is murdered—but no one seems to mind except Ed Harris’ Corporal Berman, and he only cares because that’s one more letter he must send to the next of kin. And through it all, as if somnambulantly navigating a field of exploding mines, walks Joaquin Phoenix’ Ray Elwood, who of all things gets caught up in a rather conventional love story. But how are these things related to one another? How are these young men somehow representative of the madness of war?

Invoking the name ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ is an example of the film’s lazy articulation of its paradoxes. There is little to suggest any similarities between the black soldiers who fought in the ‘Indian Wars’ following the Civil War and the group of soldiers depicted in the film. The grim paradox about the original Buffalo Soldiers was that they were black men enlisted to help fight Native Americans—one oppressed group used as a tool to fight another. As complicated as their reasons were, above all the Buffalo Soldiers probably had it in mind to advance their position in American society.

What ambitions, besides doing the next drug deal, do these men have? It is implied that the soldiers in Elwood’s company are mostly ex-cons, but even if this is true it merely underscores the difficulty in juxtaposing them with the original Buffalo Soldiers because both are outcasts from the power elite for entirely different reasons. The connections are unclear and left up to the audience to make. But the theme is so unfocused as to appear half-baked. This is nowhere more apparent than when Stoney, a black soldier, dresses as a Confederate for a Civil War-themed costume party. Aside from providing an occasion for a wisecrack, nothing is gained by this sight gag.

“Buffalo Soldiers” does spin a compelling yarn about life on a peace-time military base self-destructing without a war. The story is far-fetched but there is a feeling that the writer was really in the world he exaggerates. Despite the fact that Robert O’Connor, whose novel is the basis for the film, never served in the military, director Gregor Jordan claimed at the Sundance Film Festival premiere that he had researched the story and verified the veracity of several of the events, including the rogue tank. The realism is downright crunchy and some of Jordan’s visuals, such as the two soldiers dreamily knifing each other in the ribs during the explosive cook-off, are genuinely unsettling and smartly emblematic of the theme.

Fact or fiction, the questions raised by the film are important. What sort of men volunteer to serve in our armed forces? Do soldiers live a monastic existence beyond our worldly concerns or is their world a microcosm of the society they are defending? One would like to assume, for the sake of their humanity and ours, that soldiers are bent to a higher will, strong where civilians are soft, and assiduously ethical in discharging their duties. The picture this film presents is nothing like that. Like the rapists in De Palma’s “Casualties of War”, the drug merchants and addicts in “Buffalo Soldiers” are at the mercy of lower drives that don’t go away just because they’re wearing Army fatigues.

These lower drives seem absent from Elwood, the Army clerk who is really a cousin of the amoral acquirer of goods familiar to adolescent boarding school movies. The subplot even plays out like a teenage drugs/love/authority story, with Elwood dating the ripe-to-be-plucked daughter of his chief nemesis the Dean, here called the Top Sergeant and played by the dependably raspy Scott Glenn. Ray is a soulless drug dealer rolling around West Germany in his Benz, but his story somehow becomes that of an almost tender innocent as he courts Robyn Lee, played by a creamy Anna Paquin. Devoid of psychological depth, his only history supplied by Phoenix’ rather fortunate lip scar, Elwood has almost no point of view about the goings-on around him.

He wins us over, anyway, by resisting the film’s contrived insanity. His naive, sometimes cock-eyed view of things provides much-needed warmth (“I see you like Japanese technology” he remarks to Top, who is in fact not a TV set enthusiast but watching Gorbachev give an important speech just before the fall of Communism). When Ray takes an impropmtu diving lesson from Robyn in a deserted swimming pool, the film drops its through-the-looking-glass pretensions and serves up a spry little star-crossed love story that brings to mind the Eighties coming-of-age tales that bejewel Rob Lowe’s resume. The story of Ray and Robyn, together with the pathetic sweetness of Colonel Berman, would have made a brilliant movie on its own. Unable to play on these strengths, “Buffalo Soldiers” remains too clever by half.