The brief history of films about Iraqi war veterans has been a woeful one.
“Stop-Loss,” co-written (with Mark Richard) and directed by Kimberly Peirce, is at least an improvement from “Home of the Brave” or “In the Valley of Elah.” While these films sincerely want to explore and expose the tribulations faced by young soldiers returning from Iraq – adjusting to life with missing limbs or overcoming feelings of persecution and suicide – the films run to the worst tendencies of liberal polemics.
“Home of the Brave,” which got a limited theatrical release, compounds its hysterical politics with terrible acting and writing. And while I doubt writer-director Paul Haggis believes the Iraq war has turned 90 percent of its veterans into murderous thugs, his “In the Valley of Elah” comes awfully close to suggesting that. Peirce avoids the mistake of framing “Stop-Loss” as a prestigious Oscar-contender. “Stop-Loss,” which comes from MTV Films, has a scrappiness to it. And Peirce’s lead performers, Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, are fine actors who look authentic in their roles.
Phillippe’s character, Sgt. Brandon King, returns to his home in Texas after a tour in Iraq expecting to be discharged. Instead he is “stop-lossed,” which effectively means, “There’s a war on, son, so I’m afraid we can’t let you go just yet.” This is the central issue of Peirce’s issue-packed film, but more than 30 minutes elapse before King gets this news.
King’s lifelong pal and squad member, Sgt. Steve Shriver (Tatum), tells him to follow regulations, regardless. King’s mother wants him to flee to Mexico. His Vietnam veteran father (a curiously underused Ciaran Hinds) tells him to reason with his commanding officer.
King listens to all this advice and goes AWOL. Joined by Shriver’s fiancée, Michele (Abbie Cornish), King heads to Washington, D.C., convinced that the Texas senator who pinned the Purple Heart on his chest a few days ago will insist on the war hero’s honorable discharge. King is amazingly naïve on this score.
Peirce, returning to feature films for the first time since 1999’s “Boys Don’t Cry,” patterns “Stop-Loss” after the socially-relevant films of the early 1970s and social-issue pictures of the 1930s. Because “Stop-Loss” is a road movie, it intentionally echoes “The Last Detail,” Hal Ashby’s 1973 drama where Jack Nicholson is a Navy lifer escorting petty thief Randy Quaid to prison.
But “Stop-Loss” reminded me even more of something I caught on Turner Classic Movies a few months ago, “Wild Boys of the Road,” a 1933 melodrama that exposed the plight of runaways during the Depression.
At every stop on his path to Washington, King meets a new character who delivers a lecture on an injustice faced by Iraqi War vets.
Peirce’s goal is to get her audience, particularly that young MTV crowd, talking about the injustice of the military’s stop-loss policy. And if the number of soldiers AWOL in America is as large as the film indicates, the media is missing a huge story.
But Peirce’s urge toward propaganda conflicts with her desire to tell the characters’ story. The result is a herky-jerky plot where central characters who come across as complex and believable are pushed aside for a stock player to come in raise another sociopolitical point.
The educational segments of “Stop-Loss” would work better in a documentary, but when Peirce does return to Phillippe and Tatum, she dramatizes the problems of the Iraqi War vet with more subtlety than we’ve seen from other filmmakers. That’s a start.
“Stop-Loss”
Two and a half stars
Genre: Drama/war
Writers: Mark Richard and Kimberly Peirce
Director: Kimberly Peirce
Other information: Rated R for graphic violence and pervasive language; running time is 113 minutes
