Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Back
Door Draft
(Stop-Loss, 4/7/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
It's
been endlessly parodied, but Winston Churchill's observation about the
Battle of Britain might as well be about the current war: "Never
before have so many owed so much to so few." If nothing less than
Western civilization depends on "victory" in Iraq, if it's
worth thousands of lives and foisting $3 trillion in debt on our children,
then not instituting a draft to relieve the strain on the all-volunteer
army is not just the President's conceit. It's a bit of hypocrisy you
and I been more than content to live with for more than five years.
Director Kimberly Peirce feels the
soldiers' sacrifice. She feels it so much, in fact, that she's at last
followed-up her acclaimed debut, 1999's Boys Don't Cry, with
a film about their plight. With its earnest tone and movie-of-the-week
topicality, Stop-Loss comes off as so painfully aware of all
the ways it could go wrong it feels like a survivor just making it to
the screen. To Peirce's credit, it may be the best on the subject yet.
But it surely won't be remembered as the definitive Gulf War II film.
Brandon (Ryan Phillippe) is a natural
leader who has seen too many of his buddies killed under his command.
Back home in Texas, he finds that some of his fellow vets have survived
in body, but have left a major portion of their wits back in Baghdad.
Then the brass drop the Big One: Brandon will not be allowed to pull
his life back together, but will be assigned to another Iraq tour due
to an obscure "stop-loss" provision in his Army contract.
This "back door draft" puts the good soldier over the edge,
sending him AWOL in search of anybody who can help him slip away from
Uncle Sam's greedy fingers.
Like Boys Don't Cry, Stop-Loss
goes in big for the supposed authencity of blue-collar life. On their
way to coping with miseries they don't know they have, Brandon and his
buddies (Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt)start with a lot of drinkin',
cussin', shootin' and pool playin', then git down to the after-hours
standbys of brawlin', drivin' drunk, and goin' soft in the sack in front
of the old lady. (Does no one coming home from Iraq just want to go
shopping at Pier One, have lunch at Appleby's, then settle down in a
massaging lounger with the latest John Grisham?) These scenes are presented
with admirable conviction—their honky-tonk setting looks exactly
as insufferable as one expects it would be. But they come off as cliches
nevertheless.
Peirce and screenwriter Mark Richard,
having established their characters in a gritty (and very well-shot)
combat sequence set in Baghdad, seem generally flummoxed about what
to do with them. When Brandon decides to run, we feel his dilemma in
opting for Canada or Mexico. What we don't feel more—but should—is
the colossal, yawning indifference of a nation that is eager to sweep
the whole Iraq mess under the rug. The hero is abandoned by the script
and meanders to and fro on the interstate. We feel a tragedy struggling
to be born, but aborted instead.
The film's saving grace is the strength
of its performances. Phillippe—a former soap star otherwise known
as Mr. Reese Witherspoon—improves on the creditable work he did
in Flags of Our Fathers. Abbie Cornish, a newcomer who's been
the subject of endless Hollywood hype, plays Michelle, a childhood friend
of Brandon's who's been waiting to marry one of his buddies (Tatum)
since before his last Iraq tour. Though her native New South Wales is
about as far from Dallas as Abu Dhabi, Cornish nails her East Texas
impersonation. Sporting all the curves of a girl who's not afraid of
a rack of barbecue, she's got the tight-lipped gravitas of John
Wayne but with much better skin. Give her a gun and she'll bring all
the boys home safe.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
back to Culture Blog