Stop-Loss (2008)

Stop-Loss, regardless of whatever else needs to be said, has a terrific first act. Director Kimberly Peirce captures an intangible, free floating battle scarred anxiety that’s legitimate and fully felt. Peirce, as a few other critics have also noted, has a knack for wrestling a certain compromised caged animal masculinity on the screen. The Iraq veterans of Stop-Loss return to America after an ambush, and find themselves doing anything to purge that restless trigger fever that’s ping ponging within them like a ricocheting bullet. They fire guns, get hammered, get laid, and wake up the next morning without the slightest hint as to what to do next.

Peirce’s previous film was Boys Don’t Cry, and that picture had a staggering intensity, detailing a senseless, awful murder, but Peirce, and this is the mark of a major artist, didn’t let her outrage trump her empathy; her killers were allowed to be broken and confused, the killing feeling less about the victim than about some sort of blood passage that no one on either side understood. Boys Don’t Cry is an emotionally rounded, stunning picture, in league with the great true-life murder accounts, within spitting distance of In Cold Blood. Stop-Loss, at its best, details a similar, almost as convincing, emotional dislocation.

Peirce doesn’t hold the momentum in this new picture though, after about a half an hour, the titular inciting incident kicks in and brings with it a familiar formula; a melodrama that hits all the usual marks of the frustrated soldier without a cause. Brandon (Ryan Phillipe) learns that he is to return to Iraq after completing his contract anyway due to a stop-loss clause that allows for the military to extend soldiers’ contracts in a time of war. Brandon is accomplished, good looking, certainly “All American” but something snaps in him. He argues that, officially, we’re not in a time of war. The argument escalates with frightening speed, and Brandon soon finds himself on the lam, considering crossing the border to evade duty and as well as returning to the possibility that he might kill more innocent people in the name of said duty.

So, yes, Stop-Loss turns into a road picture, as well as a veteran coming to terms with the war picture, though the film both to its benefit and detriment, turns out to be less about the Iraq war than War in general. The film hinges on a conflict that’s admirably gray. Brandon’s actions are understandable, to a point, but they are also self-absorbed, and Peirce doesn’t let us forget that. Brandon’s actions take a toll on his fellow soldiers, most notably Steve (Channing Tatum) and Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who feel as lost as he does and need their friend, their leader’s, support. Brandon argues that the stop-loss clause is a backdoor draft, but that comparison isn’t fair, the clause is, after all, in the contract he willingly signed.

There’s never really much doubt how the film is going to end, but Peirce’s first act builds considerable good will, and she’s too canny to ever totally squander it; the speech laden war picture clichés are side stepped (occasionally) in appealingly live wire ways. One of my favorite moments in the film, and probably one of the most truthful to pop up in this wave of Iraq pictures, happens about half-way in. Brandon is getting loaded at a dive with Steve’s girlfriend, who’s driving him to speak to a senator, and, as he’s about to launch into one of those self-righteous indignant speeches of which characters in these movies have a habit of launching into, she cuts him off, and says, simply, “let’s just get drunk.” There is nothing in In the Valley of Elah to rival those words.

There is nothing in any of the Iraq films that I’ve seen that rivals Brandon’s encounter in with Rico (Victor Rasuk), a soldier nursing severe injuries from the opening ambush who still maintains an air of (perhaps blind) let’s go over there and fuck them up patriotism. Rico does curls with his remaining arm, and sniffs the air for the beautiful woman he can tell Brandon has brought with him. Rasuk was memorable in Lords of Dogtown, but his practicality and optimism are devastating here, and has the odd effect of further discrediting our hero, who, after this episode, feels like a self-pitying prick. One of Rasuk’s final lines, about getting killed so his family can obtain legal residence in the U.S., should feel editorial, but there’s no shaking off his gleeful matter of fact delusion.

Stop-Loss’s biggest problem may be that Peirce has seemingly chosen the least interesting soldier in the squad to focus on. Phillipe is fine, delivering perhaps his strongest, most convincing lead performance after floundering in Breach last year, but it’s his friends that continue to haunt. Tommy and Steve are clichés (one is the unquestioning straight arrow, the other an alcoholic with a relationship and stability problem) but Tatum and Levitt, like Rasuk, get under the skin and play against expectations: they are quieter, livelier, more self-loathing and screwed up than the movies usually allow them to be. After two pictures it’s clear that Peirce is marvelous with actors, and she’s equally confident playing in the usually vanilla true life wannabe profound sandbox, she finds the humanity in old notes and conventions, and shakes them up and reminds us why we listened to them so much to begin with. Stop-Loss is a minor, messy, admirable, appealing movie; an old-fashioned curiosity of war picture that has the good manners to be an engaging story.

★★★

Posted on April 3rd, 2008 in Reviews, Drama, 2008 |

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