曾经,史蒂芬(凯文·科斯特纳 Kevin Costner 饰)亦是怀揣着保家卫国的热血理想参军踏上了战场,然而,知道真正的身处于炮火之中时,史蒂芬才发现,战争,无论对于己方还是敌人,都是一场惨无人道的酷刑。史蒂夫幸运的成为了战场上的幸存者,返回了家乡,没想到这里一切早已物是人非,史蒂芬决定依靠自己的双手,重建家园。
史蒂芬有两个孩子,在孩子们眼中,浴战火而重生的父亲显然就是英雄的典范,可是史蒂芬却想向孩子们揭开战争的残酷本质。两个孩子在一颗大树上建造了一间树屋作为秘密基地,没想到这间树屋却成为了另一场战争的导火索。
Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman), a worn-out private detective, is hired to look for a 16-year-old girl who has run away from the luxury home of her mother, formerly a small-time actress in Los Angeles. The more the weary cynic tries to get under the surface of the seemingly simple case, the harder it is for him to find his bearings among the lies and deceptions that surround him. Eight years after the key New Hollywood film Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn and Gene Hackman reunited to collaborate on what was to become one of the most undervalued films of the decade. Like Polanski in Chinatown or Altman in The Long Goodbye, in his revisionist film noir, Penn also allows the 1940s classic genre to pervade the complex reality of the 1970s. The feelings of bitterness and emptiness in the modern Chandleresque protagonist originate not only in the “public” sphere of the strange, increasingly convoluted case, but in his private life as well (boyhood trauma, a broken marriage). As Moseby remarks of a sporting event, “nobody’s winning … one side is just losing slower than the other.”