STOP-LOSS

It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s a powerful movie.

Like most people, I haven’t seen all the Iraq War movies—documentaries or fiction. And there are great ones that have already been made. But I got the chance to see STOP-LOSS last night, and because of the strength of the message it conveyed, and of most of the acting, the occasional weakness in writing and direction didn’t bother me.

Maybe because I was in the service for over four years when I was in my late teens and early twenties—the age of most servicemen and women, including the ones depicted in this movie—I cut it some slack, because the feel of what it’s like to be an enlisted man in the service certainly came across as realistic to me.

And even though I wasn’t in a war zone, nor did I see any kind of violence other than drunken brawls and the sanctioned physical and mental abuse in basic training and disciplinary actions, I remember clearly the feelings of pent up rage and frustration, of testosterone gone wild, of battling loyalties to oneself, one’s buddies, one’s country, one’s commanders, one’s mission, one’s duty, and so on seemingly endlessly.

Back in the 1960s, even when I was in college on the G. I. Bill (which Iraq veterans don’t even get to the limited extent I got, and John McCain has voted against increasing veterans’ benefits to make them more comparable to what he and I had access to!—though of course him much more because he was an officer) I never discussed my service experiences or even wrote about them.

It wasn’t until I saw THE LAST DETAIL, in which Jack Nicholson and Randy Quaid kicked ass as Naval (if I remember correctly) enlisted men, Nicholson’s character trying to return Quaid’s to the service after being AWOL (for which I was courtmartialed, so know a little about). Sitting in a movie theater in Washington DC watching that film, I felt like my head was going to explode.

I’ve calmed down since then, but even so, movies that really capture what it felt like for me in the service (another great example is FULL METAL JACKET, the first half of which, before they go to Nam, compared well on the realism scale to my experiences) move me deeply.

So did STOP-LOSS.

Ryan Phillippe and Abbie Cornish (I only heard last night and this morning about their private lives, which seem more important to the public these days than their skill as actors) are both outstanding in lead roles. Cornish isn’t as beautiful or as great an actor as Scarlet Johanson, but she has the same capacity for exposing unattractive sides of her character’s looks and personality in ways that seem much braver than most young movie actors, male or female. And I bought her character’s emotional life pretty much in every scene she was in.

Phillippe keeps surprising me. I expect him to be a pretty boy, or one of those typical young Hollywood movie actors who just can’t seem to come up to the mark of manhood that was common among young stars of the past but seems so absent since the 1980s (e.g. Tom Cruise still comes across as a boy!), but then Phillippe pulls it off, as he did in FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS. His youthful looks and manners seem in sync with the reality that war is a young man’s, and now woman’s, world for the most part.

And Channing Tatum has been a favorite young actor since my ten-year-old and I caught him in STEP UP, a cheezy street-vs.-academy dance film that he made work by the sheer charm of his screen presence and not-bad acting chops. He plays the big, good looking oaf in both films, but mostly pulls off the power as well as the sensitivity, and often with some subtlety. He also does the physical bits perfectly. He comes across as boyish, but that always fits the roles he’s playing. Whether he can make the transition to playing more mature characters I don’t know. But the final, and most powerful, scene in STOP-LOSS may be the prelude to his future in more mature roles.

Pretty much everyone in the film does good work, a tribute to the casting and directing (especially Timothy Olyphant as the men’s commander—he is maturing into a really solid actor—and the actors playing the parents of Ryan Phillippe’s character, Ciaran Hinds and Linda Emond, who is pitch perfect in her depiction of the strain on a young serviceman’s mother).

But on the other hand, some of the performances are much less than flawless, a mark against the direction, as well as the writing. E. g, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the kid from THIRD ROCK FROM THE SUN, makes you forget in some scenes his earlier roles and embodies the character he’s playing, but at other times he’s obviously out of his league.

There are elements to the story that I would have rewritten to make them more realistic and less formulaic, mainly the war scenes in Iraq. They’re a little too much cowboys and Indians and not enough the realities of this war (though they mean to be, but depictions of atrocities seem more Hollywood than the faux-home videos the movie incorporates into the story). Though the director’s brother has served in Iraq and the story is based on real soldiers’ experiences, the tendency seems to be to side with the soldiers, understandably. Even the “liberal anti-war lawyer” is portrayed as sleazy and insensitive, even uncaring, as if he’s in it for the five hundred bucks.

And the idea that the Army doesn’t send back to Iraq men and women who have gotten in trouble with the law when drunk, or have mental problems caused by Iraq, doesn’t live up to the reality of news stories about people with criminal records being allowed into the Army and fighting in Iraq (and responsible for many of the crimes committed there by our troops, though not all by far) and troops with mental disorders caused by the war, even Post Traumatic Distress Disorder, being shipped back, because there aren’t enough troops, and most of them have been broken by this conflict anyway, so if you were to refuse to use those who get DUIs and such, there’d be even less troops (about the only thing that can guarantee the armed forces letting you go and not sending you back to Iraq is if you are found out to have committed a homosexual act, ‘cause God knows gay soldiers are of no use on the battlefield, as opposed to criminal or mentally sick ones!).

But despite whatever quibbles I may have with the movie, bottom line, for this viewer, STOP-LOSS is one of the most powerful films I’ve seen in awhile, not a masterpiece by any means, but a film well worth seeing, and thinking about.