A great wartime film like Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero
never let a character ask, “What the hell happened to these guys?” as
does Michele (Abbie Cornish), a young Texan woman in the new wartime
movie Stop-Loss. Heroism was implicit in Hollywood’s WWII attitude
toward soldiers. But now, Michele worries about the post-traumatic
distress suffered by some of the neighborhood guys who just returned
from military service in Iraq. Her fiancé Steve (Channing Tatum) freaks
out and bails on his engagement to her, while his best friend, Brandon
King (Ryan Phillippe)—a fearless can-do sergeant who led infantry in
Tikrit—goes on the run after the army reneges on his contract and
refuses to discharge him.
Forcing soldiers to go back for another tour of duty—what the military
calls Stop-Loss policy—was hardly a phenomenon of the draft era that
Sturges depicted. Neither was Michele’s shaken confidence about what
soldiers do for their country. So the way Stop-Loss flips the
homecoming scenario into contemporary alarm isn’t necessarily more
realistic or smarter than Sturges. Fact is, Conquering Hero was not
naive; it probed the moral bases of fighting men who had to put victory
behind them. But being short of victory and facing a forced,
mock-celebration, the young veterans in Stop-Loss give us a contrasting
wartime story. This confrontation with soldiers’ despair shames the
public’s indifference to veterans’ suffering, yet it isn’t greater
truth than Sturges—simply a somber expression of the contemporary
political moment.
It is necessary to look past the modishness of this MTV Films
production, aimed at the youth audience that resembles the film’s
characters. Michele’s bewilderment mostly reflects the deeply divided
concern of director-writer Kimberly Peirce, who based Stop-Loss on her
brother’s Iraq War experience (he joined-up after 9/11, out of
patriotic zeal) and her own research into other veterans’ various
strategies of post-service flight or resistance.
Not simply on the anti-Bush bandwagon, Peirce’s personal and
professional ambivalence makes Stop-Loss the most conflicted movie yet
about the Iraq War. It differs from Sturges’ film (as well as the other
WWII classics) through a skeptical regard of military duty. A child of
the post-Vietnam era, Peirce hasn’t made a war movie so much as an
anti-military screed. Even more pointed than Irwin Winkler’s trenchant
and unfairly ignored Home of the Brave, with its casualties-of-war
sympathies, Peirce’s film struggles to rectify her objection to the war
with veterans’ unapologetic sacrifices. Peirce’s script (co-credited to
Mark Richard) goes for heartbreak, while distancing the facile,
pseudo-political judgments that reduce so many recent Iraq films to
diatribe.
Stop-Loss comes close to achieving a genuine human drama. Its mix of
rap and country-western tunes partially suggest a high school varsity
team sent into the maw of war. (Peirce’s battle scenes are sloppy, but
like George Cukor’s soapy 1944 Winged Victory, she ogles a disarming
cast: Phillippe, Tatum, Victor Rasuk, Rob Brown, Steven Strait, Timothy
Olyphant all indict war as a despoiler of youthful beauty). Yet this is
still a fantasy. Peirce conflates war tragedy with her own sense of
melodrama, making Stop-Loss a coincidentally sexy polemic. It could be worse.
The dreadful sense of national betrayal that has common in most recent
wartime dramas (from Flags of Our Fathers to In the Valley of Elah)
deprives popular audiences of compassion, preventing them from
understanding the basic human components of citizenship and duty. Most
liberal filmmakers pre-condemn any reason that may compel a young
person to sign up for the military. This slanted perspective on the
Iraq War appeals only to the discontent of the war’s critics. Stories
that might be rich in valor or personal conflict become little more
than anti–Iraq War propaganda. Yet Peirce aims deeper, as in a
truncated Joseph Gordon-Levitt subplot about lost boys who join up out
of a need to belong to anything. And several montages of soldiers’
video-recordings broadcast on the Internet recall the handmade evidence
in Brian De Palma’s Redacted. But where De Palma botched his
investigation of American machismo (that film’s too-brief monologue
about luckless boys named after Vegas and Reno), Peirce concentrates on
the backgrounds of working-class lads who submit themselves to
patriotic exploitation.
Although Stop-Loss doesn’t entirely succumb to the biases of war
defectors, it never creates the sense of diverse community that is so
effervescently, unpredictably democratic in Conquering Hero. Peirce’s
Braxos, Texas, town elders are stoic, sensitive and young folk full of
folly. She seems to know less about the humor of Operation Iraqi
Freedom GIs than David O. Russell knew about Operation Desert Storm
soldiers in Three Kings.
The most empathetic scenes are undercut by programmed moments of
confusion: When stout-hearted Michele accompanies Brandon’s visit to
the family of a wounded platoon member, Peirce mixes anxious faces (a
resigned father, tense mother, a resentful sibling) with Michele’s
solicitous respect and Brandon’s trembling sorrow. This scene recalls
the most original moments in Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry that captured
sexy, anxious youth in a grim social circumstance. But what
follows—Brandon’s angry retaliation against three punks who just
vandalized his car—comes up short. The disrespectful street crime
triggers Brandon’s combat reflexes, yet Peirce can’t sustain the
equation of domestic economics and world politics that emerges: the
limited choices society leaves young men. The draft question vs. the
sloth question. War at home or war abroad. There is no clear
counterpoint.
You can see Peirce feeling her way through this homeland quagmire.
Thankfully, she feels for her actors and what they represent: Michele’s
patience and toughness and Brandon’s almost bottomless misery. Without
pushing Brandon and Michele’s relationship into romantic cliché, Peirce
allows them immediate rapport. Her restraint keeps us conscious of
their social dilemma while observing their existential-erotic anguish.
Seeing how seriously Ryan Phillippe digs into Brandon’s burden (he’s
fighting for his rights, his survival, his friends’ sanity and his
soldierly dignity) recalls how disappointingly shallow his character
was in Flags of Our Fathers. Clint Eastwood only permitted his cast
cliché emotions; Eastwood’s fashionable, cynical, anti-war schematics
made each actor a puppet. Peirce makes them vibrant.
Phillippe’s Brandon is a righteous malcontent without a plan. He evokes
Jon Voight in Coming Home, one of the post-Vietnam homecoming movies
that Peirce cites as an influence. She uses Tatum for his heavy-lidded
sensuality, a strapping jock who depends on Brandon’s level-headedness.
(“If you don’t fall in beside us, it all comes apart.”) Yet none of
these sensitive, James Dean types quite contain the social breadth of
Hail the Conquering Hero nor Kenny Chesney’s fine Iraq War music video
“Who You’d Be Today”—an example of non-Hollywood pop culture that
memorializes the mixed feelings of private loss and personal duty that
the Iraq War has stirred.
Stop-Loss is merely a respectable effort. It doesn’t match Chesney’s
compassion, nor does it convey the insight of Bruce Springsteen’s 2007
album Magic, which used the Iraq War experience to comprehend how love,
faith and tradition are manifest in contemporary wartime. Peirce’s
military critique misses the deep-rooted Americanism that Springsteen
lamented. In the song “Long Walk Home,” Springsteen went deeper, into
domestic hegemony:
“My father said/ Son, you’re lucky in this town/ It’s a beautiful place
to be born/ It just wraps its arms around you/ Nobody crowds you/
Nobody goes it alone/ You know that flag flying over the courthouse/ It
means certain things are set in stone/ Who we are and what we’ll do and
what we won’t.”
Springsteen wasn’t celebrating superficial patriotism but singing about
the American myths that have been disproved. The things we were
formerly told were facts—the ideology we were hopefully encouraged to
believe—that no longer hold true. Stop-Loss doesn’t compare to
Springsteen’s devastating insight. Its pathos is too close to the easy,
glib dissent of indie coteries following partisan fashion.
The fact that Stop-Loss is little more than a rhetorical fantasy can be
grasped from its characters whose masculine agony lacks the complexity
Springsteen describes and are no more credible than the boys in the
fight movie Never Back Down. If anything, Never Back Down’s generic
strategies are more expressive of male anxiety than Peirce’s war-movie
seriousness. (A sequence in a veteran’s hospital evokes the
unforgettable amputee scene in The Best Years of Our Lives without
coming close to that film’s humility.) Being better than In the Valley
of Elah’s lazy view of returning vets as damaged and mentally depraved
isn’t good enough.
We won’t likely ever see an Iraq War movie as compelling—or unifying—as
Hail the Conquering Hero, The Best Years of Our Lives or Til the End of
Time. That’s not because we are hopelessly polarized, it’s simply that
most filmmakers are stuck in the partisan view that a war not of their
own choosing diminishes those who participate in it and makes them
dupes. Stop-Loss judges its Texas veterans in terms taken from
Vietnam-era dissent. Peirce doesn’t exactly rise to the occasion for
national unity, but at least her final image of Brandon/Phillippe
doesn’t sink into fashionable cynicism.