Compelling, but not necessarily satisfying

Rating: Null/10 (9 April 2008)

-----------------------------spoiler alert -------------------- Kimberly Peirce's first film since "Boys Don't Cry" tackles a big topic, maybe one that is too big for any director to attempt to cover in a single film. The irony is, she accomplishes her goals in terms of making a riveting movie, but perhaps fails in efforts to truly illuminate as complex an issue as the war in Iraq.
The plot is that Army sergeant Ryan Phillippe, a veteran of both the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns, finds out on the day he is mustering out of the Army that he is being stop lossed, meaning sent back involuntarily for another combat tour in Iraq.
But plot holes develop almost as quickly as he finds himself conscripted in what he refers to as a back door draft.
The first problem is that he immediately jumps the tracks and goes AWOL, when his carefully crafted image from the early parts of the movie show him to be a thoughtful, highly responsible soldier. Yes, he might eventually break the rules and jump ship, but not immediately and the film would have been even more interesting if he'd fought his situation through legal channels before deserting.
From there, a lot of the film deals with another problem, the post traumatic stress syndrome he and his small town Texas buddies are facing, in his case, largely because he led his men into a rather obvious ambush while in Baghdad, a trap that got his best friend killed and others wounded.
From there, the film deals with his life on the run, ironically with the ex-fiancé of another of his buddies, and that life affords a look at the white working class background upon which America's all volunteer Army is now built. While a little clichéd, it does remind us that there are tens of thousands of troops from that very background, many of whom seem to know or understand almost nothing about the war they have volunteered to fight.
______________________spoiler-------------------------- In the end, Phillippe's character turns himself in and winds up climbing aboard the bus that is the first step on the road back to Iraq. The trouble with the scene is it comes as a shock and its hard to know whether the filmmaker was saying Philippe was wrong all along, or that the average guy is just no match for the pressures being a good, dutiful American place on a young man.
Its sort of like Congress getting a clear mandate from voters in November of 2006 to end the war, but doing virtually nothing about it, because Democrats don't have the votes to overcome a Republican veto and then take the heat that would follow.
Whatever the message, it seemed to me to be a somewhat muddled one, and there is not much resolution to the story, as what it gives us is an ending that would have been more powerful had it come down hard on one side of the issue or the other.
Still, this film in all fairness works as a movie up to the end and I would not stay away just because it falls down there.