Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Stop Loss


Sgt. Brandon King, Ryan Phillippe, had been a good soldier, fought in Iraq, done everything his Army and his country had asked. He held up his side of the bargain. Stop-Loss, an emotional film about a war that has divided the country like no conflict since Vietnam, delves into what happens when the country doesn't do as well for its soldiers as they do for it. The latest in a long line of films about the war in Iraq, it asks hard questions about the price that fighting men and women are asked to pay, and dismisses any suggestion that the answers will come easy.

From its opening scenes, of a group of soldiers at an Iraqi checkpoint trying to decide in just a few seconds whether that car speeding toward them is someone about to shoot or a civilian too scared to realize how hard he's pressing the accelerator, Stop-Loss is set in a world where realistic confusion is prominent. Decisions filled with life-threatening consequences are an every day thing. Brandon knows that far too well, especially after a brash decision to chase some attackers into an alleyway leaves several members of his squad dead or wounded. In retrospect, he made the wrong decision. But at the time, it seemed like the only option.

Sadly, Brandon is going to spend the rest of the film facing similar situations. Few of his decisions are going to win him any popularity contests. As shitty as his time in Iraq, it's when Brandon returns home that the real tragedies start to unfold. He and his high school buddies, who had enlisted together to fight in Iraq, can't function in small-town Texas anymore. They drink too much, fight too easily, despair too openly. They're wounded in ways even they don't understand and changed in ways that frighten those around them. But for Brandon, at least, the war is over. His enlistment is up. He can stay home and fight to return to some sort of normalcy. Only the rules change, and Brandon finds himself "stop-lossed" - forced by the Army to serve another tour in Iraq, when he only enlisted for one.

Desperate and unable to imagine a return to the hell he thought he'd left behind, Brandon goes absent without leave - just another one of those last-minute decisions with consequences. This one puts him on the run, a fugitive in the country he once served. Phillippe is consistently believable as a soldier trying to do what's right, as well as a civilian trying to do what is right - which is, after all, the central conflict his character faces. As a soldier, he's taught to obey rules and trust his instincts. But when the rules no longer apply and his instincts start failing him, what's left?

Channing Tatum, however, needs a bit of a lesson in over-acting. Tatum, a long way from the break-dancing streets of Baltimore he inhabited in Step Up, is Steve, a square-jawed warrior who runs his life as a matter of honor and duty, and doesn't understand how Brandon can profess to do the same, even while going AWOL.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Tommy, by contrast, has no real concept of anything. All he knows is rage and that the Army has given him a place to vent. Remove him from that environment, and he's nothing. Keep him there, and he's a danger to everyone, himself included. He ends up killing himself.

Stuck in the middle of all this twisted situation and conflicted allegiances is Michelle (Abbie Cornish). She begins the film as Steve's fiancee and ends it as Brandon's partner in flight. Michelle is the damage in this fight, a stand-in for all of us struggling to make sense of Iraq and the ever-changing rules. Her face drained of any joy, her eyes pleading for a moment of clarity, Cornish never lets us forget for a moment how confused and overwhelmed she is by all of this.

Writer-director Kimberly Peirce, in her first film since 1999's Boys Don't Cry, is guilty of painting perhaps too bleak a picture; the rural Texas town these soldiers return to seems only marginally more civilized than the war zone they left in Tikrit. It's a little over-done at times and can all be a little over the top, but at the same time, the facts show that over 80,000 soldiers have been stop-lossed and over 2000 returned soldiers have commited suicide. So how over the top can it be if this is really happening? But this doesn't really take away any of the film's power to see a depressing and realistic depiction of returned Iraq soldiers.

B+