Stop-Loss

It s not easy to make a powerful anti-Iraq war movie without being--or seeming--polemical. Or simplistic. Or obvious. But Kimberly Peirce, in her first feature since Boys Don’t Cry, as co-screenwriter, producer, and director of Stop-Loss, has found in the story of three childhood Texas friends and volunteers for the war a lacerating and evocative palimpsest to bring the war-movie genre to a distant shore. What Clint Eastwood achieved with another palette in Letters from Iwo Jima, she has achieved here.

The story is disarmingly simple. The three friends--Brandon (Ryan Phillippe), the central figure; Steve (Channing Tatum); and Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Hewitt)--are encountered on routine road-barricade duty in Iraq when they are drawn into a disastrous ambush in narrow city alleys. Under Brandon's leadership, they suffer numerous casualties and Steve is seriously wounded. Soon, however, they are on their way home to be released from service. But as Brandon hands in his release papers after a hometown parade, he is startled to find that he is being redeployed to Iraq through the Stop-Loss policy. This permits the extension of service in cases of "emergency"--few had read the fine print in their sign up-papers. Brandon bitterly complains to his superior (Timothy Olyphant) to no avail. While he contemplates the ramifications of "fight or flight," which others extended by Stop-Loss have done, Steve, now recovered, finds in alcohol a solace for the sense of loss he feels for the kinship and camaraderie of soldiering. His longtime girlfriend Michele (Abbie Cornish), put off by him previously through his signing up, now begins to fear that he will be married to soldiering, no matter what happens. Alongside this, Tommy is showing the effects of post-traumatic stress, drinking and brawling in self-destructive behavior that gets him first in the brig and then a dishonorable discharge. His wife Jeanie (Mamie Gummer) tries sympathetically to cope, but cannot.

Brandon decides--not out of fear but out of principle--that Stop-Loss is fundamentally unfair after heartfelt family discussion and that he must flee to Canada. He is declared AWOL and is being sought by police and the military. Michele accompanies him north to help him elude capture. During the trip there is a bitter confrontation and battle with Steve. But Brandon has arranged his Canadian escape when in a final conversation with his mother he learns that Tommy ha committed suicide.

Drawn ineluctably back to Texas for the funeral, Canada notwithstanding, Brandon faces a new fight or flight, this time to Mexico. But as he faces self versus other, friendship and love versus self-preservation, he comes up against the eternal enigma. Peirce presents no "answer," or rather an ending to read any which way a viewer chooses. Ambiguity reigns.

The actors live in their characters. Ryan Phillippe is superb, but Channing Tatum has perhaps the best-written role, and bests it. Joseph Gordon-Hewitt is better here than in Mysterious Skin, than which there is no greater praise. Abbie Cornish plays Michele's anguish over Steve and her attraction to Brandon in mumerous and subtle shades. Ciaran Hinds, as Brandon's father, quietly wrings fierce emotion from several brief scenes with his son.

Attention must be paid to Chris Menges, director of photograpy, for exceptional attention to Kimberly Peirce's vision. Every close-up, every wide angle, every overhead maps out the singular thrust of this film. Oscar-awarded for The Mission and The Killing Field (but not for the extraordinary Tommy Lee Jones-directed The Three Burials of Melchiades Estrada), Menges seems dna-injected with his directors' drive.

A worthy successor to Boys Don’t Cry.

                                                              Howard Buck