Driving into a lamppost back home

Kimberly Pierce, who gave us the impressive Girls Don't Cry, is back with an intense, in some ways crude, sporadically riveting, but most of all horribly muddled drama about Iraq war soldiers. There are plenty of reasons for this to be an anti-war movie, but it winds up rah-rah. You could almost say Pierce doesn't know what movie she's making, because things just don't add up. The fundamental flaw is the premise itself, stop-loss, the government's current system of returning selected soldiers involuntarily to another tour of Iraq war duty to make up for the fact that there aren't sufficient numbers of available fresh troops and there's no draft. This bureaucratic injustice, for which there is essentially no redress, just isn't enough of a theme to hang a whole complex war story on.

When protagonist Staff Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) comes back to Texas with his two best buddies, who were over there with him, there's a parade and he gets medals. But before that we've seen him in an ugly pursuit of insurgents in Tikrit who strafed his checkpoint from a speeding car. King leads his unit into a narrow congested block of houses and an ambush. The insurgents are waiting in apartments and on rooftops to pick them off and several of his men are killed and one of the best loved, Rico Rodriguez (Victor Rasuk) loses an arm and a leg and his sight.

Back home, Brandon botches a speech after the parade, but his pals have much worse problems. After they all get very drunk and start brawling at a dance hall, Brandon's burly best pal Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum) beats up his girlfriend Michele (Abbie Cornish) and digs himself a foxhole in his skivvies out in front. Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Leavitt) is a continual drunk who's expelled by his fiancée, drives into a lamppost on his way over to Brandon's, and shoots up his wedding presents with a rifle. The men's ways of straightening each other out in these circumstances invariably involve physical violence.

It's obvious there's more than a little PTSS going on here, but the loud music and the drumbeats keep hinting to us that these are just boys being boys.

When Brandon's told he's been stop-lossed and must report back for Iraq in short order, he can't bear it. He's done his duty, he's served well, but he's had enough. He goes to his superior officer and in front of the lieutenant curses the order and the President. He's taken off to the brig, but on the way there assaults the MP's and escapes in Shriver's jeep, eventually running off on a journey to Washington with Michele to see the Senator who congratulated him, stopping off on the way for a visit with Rodriguez.

Things start to go wrong structurally on the journey; maybe the movie was never coherent. Tommy's story back home keeps popping in and out, but it seems to have wound up missing some big pieces. Brandon and Michele jump from place to place with no clear sense of logistics; sometimes Brandon, whose scar from a fight heals with astonishing rapidity, seems to be a ghost.

He's cracking too, as shows when he attacks some car thieves calling them "hajis" and shooting them, after getting badly knocked up himself. Later he dives into a motel pool to rescue Steve, but it's only a big towel. It's not certain if we're seeing how the Iraq veterans carry the war home, or how the movie's relying too much on violent and crazy incidents in lieu of meaningful dialogue. The Texas drawls are laid on awfully thick, and so is the corn pone atmosphere. Phillippe, Gordon-Leavitt, et al., nonetheless handle their heavily telegraphed moments with grace and conviction. Phillippe gives his role, surely his most challenging yet, just about everything it's got. Unfortunately his character winds up being more bluster than thought.

In the end the Senator isn't available to help an AWOL soldier, and Brandon's left with the choice of going back or hiding out in Canada. He pops up in Manhattan, and later on the Mexican border. Again, the logistics are ghost-like.

"Stop-loss" is certainly an unsavory tactic. Supporters of the war would say it's necessary, and in coldly practical terms maybe it is. But the point is that when it comes to the complex issues of this war and of the soldiers' situations it's really a red herring, and beside the point. Pierce's movie constantly touches on those larger issues, only to wind up by dodging them. Any thinking person has to walk out of the movie wanting to take a hint from the soldiers in the story and smash something. Pierce undoubtedly meant well, but she latched onto the wrong wagon here. The result is especially frustrating because this is a movie that makes a stab at relating Iraq war combat to soldiers' life back home, it dramatizes post-traumatic dysfunction briefly but vividly, and it has more energy, emotion, and mainstream appeal than any of the recent spate of movies on the subject. The camaraderie of the young soldiers, their turmoil and violence, their inability to function back at home, couldn't be more palpable. But in the end this is really a faux issue-movie. The final payoff isn't just a cop-out; it's inexplicable.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.