Stop-Loss - Too Late

Here we have it, Kimberly Peirce's first film in 9 years.  After shooting to the A-list with the true crime story Boys Don't Cry and trying and failing to get several films up there on the big screen (including Silent Star, about the murder of early film director and actor William Desmond Taylor, and Memoirs of a Geisha, which she refused to do because of a studio mandated PG-13 rating), Peirce finally buckled down and committed to an Iraq war movie based, in part, on the experiences of her brother, a soldier in the U.S. Army.  Considering that Iraq war movies are the kiss of death at the box office, maybe she should have held off a little longer.

There's nothing wrong with Stop-Loss, per se, except that we've been there done that with countless other war films over the past thirty-odd years, and there's nothing exceptional about the Iraq war that warrants returning to the territory explored by Hal Ashby in Coming Home and Oliver Stone in Born on the Fourth of July, not to mention last year's critically-praised but publicly-ignored Tommy Lee Jones vehicle, In the Valley of Elah.  (Stop-Loss bears a resemblance to all three films.)

When I saw previews of this film several months ago, I predicted an episode of Friday Night Lights except with soldiers, and I wasn't far off.  There's something stagnant about Hollywood's portrayal of Texans as a bunch of hard-drinking, sweaty, flannel wearing hicks who don't shave or bathe, and congregate in massive community halls where they square dance and drink pitchers of beer like they're going out of style.  That's what you see here, a community frozen in time at about 1985, with rusted pick-up trucks and ten gallon hats, and good-old boys brawling over their girlfriends, and their red-blooded American parents just so proud of their sons for protecting America from the tyranny of evil.

In this movie, a group of soldiers returns from Iraq on a twenty-eight day lay over after a terrorist attack on their battalion results in several of their soldiers' deaths.  One of the soldiers, Tommy Burgess (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), gets married, gets in a fight with his wife that night, and wakes up the next day drunk and having crashed his car into a telephone pole.  He decides to go to a park with his friends, swig beer, have a little barbecue, and use his wedding presents as target practice.  Another soldier, Steve Shriver (played by Channing Tatum), ignores the advances of his girlfriend and gets too drunk to stand, and digs a Ranger grave in his front yard and sleeps in it in his underwear because he is afraid the enemy is all around him and he is going to get shot.  The main character, Brandon King (played by Ryan Phillippe), has it easy compared to these other guys.  He just hears explosions and gunshots and screams of pain and torture at random intervals during the day, just like Rambo did in First Blood.

This stuff has all been done before.

The main thread of the plot follows Phillippe's character as he finds out he has been stop-lossed (a military term for recovering troops who have fulfilled their contracts and sending them back into action), and will be sent back to Iraq at the end of the month.  Instead of complying, he insults his commanding officers, assaults some MPs, and goes AWOL with his best friend's girl (Abbie Cornish's character, Michelle).  The rest of the movie follows them on the run through an underground railroad series of cheap motels where other AWOL soldiers are hiding out with their families while awaiting the results of a lawsuit against the government to outlaw the stop-loss rule.

It's rather silly to consider that soldiers seeking to escape going back to Iraq would resort to hiding out in cheap motels and enlisting the aid of forgers to create alternate identities for them so they can slip over the border into Canada or Mexico like they just escaped from prison.  I guess this kind of shit happens.  I don't know, I would just drive to an airport and fly to France like Roman Polanski did.  I doubt they would check your name against some list of AWOL soldiers from Texas.  But that's just me, and this is just some movie.  Albeit an MTV-produced movie from a highly-lauded A-list director coming off a nine year sabbatical into a well-worn and tired genre.

There is a lot of heart in this movie.  The acting is good.  The message is good.  Everything is good.  It may seem like I didn't like it.  I liked it just fine, it's just that there's nothing to distinguish it from all the other ones, and there's nothing about Peirce's direction or script to distinguish it from anyone else's.

When Platoon came out in 1986, the Viet Nam war had been done to death.  It was eight years after the first great Viet Nam war film won Best Picture (The Deer Hunter in 1978) and a host of others had been nominated.  Platoon, or course, won four Oscars including Picture and Director, and is a milestone in war cinema.  So I'm not saying there can be no Iraq war masterpiece yet in our future, I'm just saying, for now, let's sit on it, let this stupid war play out, and then tell our stories about it a little bit later.  After we've simmered down.  After, hopefully, our economy has recovered, and people can start loving movies again.

And as for Kimberly Peirce ...  Richard Kelly wrote and directed Donnie Darko in 2001.  It is some kind of strange masterpiece.  For his sophomore effort, he directed Southland Tales in 2007.  It is some kind of strange piece of shit.  At least Peirce didn't do that.  Maybe, for her third film, she'll get it back in gear and deliver something exceptional instead of just your average war film.