Too many clichés, but it's hard not to be moved

Rating: 7/10 (30 March 2008)

The long-absent director of Boys Don't Cry returns with her sophomore feature, an Iraq War drama. Ryan Phillipe plays a Texan who returns home from a terrible tour in Iraq to find that the Army has "stop-lossed" him, meaning they have re-recruited him, though he was supposed to get out of the service. He decides to run and try to fight it. Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt play two of his buddies who fought beside him and also live in the same small town. Truth be told, I wanted to see this movie mostly for Gordon-Levitt, and he delivers the best performance in the film. Phillipe is good, too, but he does not affect a very good Texas accent, which gets annoying. The film is unfortunately created pretty much entirely from clichés. Think "redneck soldiers" and you can write a lot of the scenes yourself. Plenty of scenes where guys in cowboy hats and boots shoot at stuff with shotguns from the back of pickup trucks. And we get the old Vietnam vet cliché of the guys mistaking Texas reality for the horrors of war, complete with echoes of gunfire and helicopters in the background. It also suffers from MTV-style editing, and, in fact, it was produced by MTV, which is a difficult stigma to overcome. The opening sequence in Iraq, which haunts Phillipe for the rest of the film, is edited too much like an action sequence, in that it's meant to elicit feelings of excitement rather than horror. Peirce has said in interviews that she was influenced by the videos real soldiers were making in Iraq, and it's kind of unfair to dismiss this kind of film-making. These soldiers, after all, are certainly influenced by MTV themselves. Still, the MTV aesthetic always tends to make things seem plastic and distanced. It might be true that the soldiers' videos are a way for them to distance themselves from reality, although that's getting away from any subject the film itself wants to explore. But, even with the clichés and the bad film-making, the film ends up succeeding, at least a little. It brings to light the whole stop-loss issue, which is not discussed enough in the media (it is, as the film says, just a back-door draft), and it gets the audience to think about what is happening to soldiers and to empathize with them. I'm sure we all say we have great empathy for their situation, but, those who don't know anybody who is fighting this war don't ever have to deal with it on an emotional level. Even when we watch the news, we tend to engage with it in a more intellectual manner than we would with a story. And I think it is partly because most of us in the voting populace dealt with the Iraq War mostly on an intellectual level that we were never able to prevent it or bring it to a close.