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Moving Pictures
Mar 27, 2008, 10:55AM

FILM REVIEW: Stop-Loss

New movie presents the costs of the Iraq War with compassion and balance, but it doesn't get into the real meat of the issue. From the New York Press.

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Frank Masi

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.

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