Stop-Loss

(dir. Kimberly Pearce)

March 28, 2008

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It’s pretty hard to stake out the middle ground on a topic as incendiary as the Iraq War. But Kimberly Pearce - whose devastating first feature, “Boys Don’t Cry,” practically puts up its fists and dares you to fight - sure has tried. And the result is a dreadfully weak, unfocused motion picture. It’s a real let-down.

Generally speaking, Pearce examines the toll Bush’s ill-defined struggle takes on the people who volunteer to fight it, and I’m all for that. But the screenplay, which Pearce co-wrote with Mark Richard, is so simplistic, much of it plays like a basic cable movie, or a well-intentioned first draft of something far more significant. Characters announce the sole concept that drives them, then they proceed to follow it straight ahead, as if they’re marching off a cliff. Regardless of what Pearce is shooting for, you quickly feel like you’re watching lemmings in fatigues.

Clichéd situations, clunky plot mechanics, unconvincing revelations— at one point or another, they’re all here. Pearce’s critical error, though, is a crew of whoopin’ and hollerin’ macho characters who, with one exception, can’t see beyond the ends of their own rifles. Self-comprehension simply isn’t in the cards for these guys, and it gets pretty bewildering after a while. Instead of wanting to embrace them and tend to their psychic wounds, you find yourself wishing you could just shake some sense into them.

At least it starts well. The story opens in Iraq. After being ambushed by a car full of insurgents, Staff Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillipe) blindly leads his men, including his hometown buddy, Sgt. Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum), down a dead-end street, and all hell breaks loose. Soldiers and civilians die in the ensuing carnage.

The skirmish takes place in an alleyway, and in the very tight quarters surrounding it, and Pearce handles the difficult spatial relations with ease. You always know where you are when you’re watching the battle, and that’s more than many high-paid action directors can accomplish (Tim Burton could lose his place filming someone put on a belt.)

Soon enough, Brandon, Steve, and their buddy, Tommy (Joseph Gordon Levitt), are shipped back to their hometown in Texas, and the clichés take hold.

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After the obligatory welcome-home parade, you get the loyal girlfriend (Abbie Cornish) who can’t believe her fiancé (that would be Tatum) only wants to pack his duffel bag and get back to the fight. There’s also the troubled kid who can’t find his bearings now that he’s back - the military’s the only family he’s got, you know - and the moist-eyed father who’s a veteran himself. Then the flashbacks start. Granted, these things actually exist, but Pearce simply introduces them, then let’s them lay there like fish on a platter, as if mentioning them is the same thing as examining their significance.

There’s not a single unique moment in the film until Brandon is informed that, even though his tour is over and he has every intention of staying home, the military is invoking a measure called Stop-Loss. You see, the President (all hail) has determined this is an emergency situation, so he has the right to send troops back for multiple tours, and there’s not a thing the soldiers can do about it. Theoretically, they could be forced to fight forever.

This, of course, is government-sanctioned horse-shit. So Brandon, who tells his c.o. he isn’t going, slugs a couple M.P.’s, steals a jeep, and - get this - decides to go to Washington, D.C., and get his Senator to tell the military he doesn’t have to go back!

I’m sorry, but you’d have to be lugging around a knapsack full of naiveté to think that’s going to happen, and Brandon is supposed to be the smart one in his group of friends. At any rate, Abbie (who kinda likes Brandon, even though Pearce, as usual, only makes a gesture toward the idea) agrees to drive Brandon to D.C. and get everything straightened out. Phillipe and Cornish have a quiet warmth about them. But it’s hardly enough to make you believe what their characters are doing.

The way Pearce sets the table, it seems like the movie will focus on the toll blind loyalty can have on you if the people you’re devoted to happen to be murderous, self-serving charlatans. But Pearce never comes close to suggesting these young men shouldn’t have signed up for duty in the first place. You can sense her struggling like crazy to keep from stepping on the soldiers’ toes - her brother fought in the conflict, inspiring her to make the movie - and politically speaking, the results are way too timid.

That’s the 800-pound gorilla at the heart of the film, and it’s the same one that keeps us from properly discussing the plight of the actual men and women who have been fighting this horrific war. Yes, they’re courageous and honorable. Of course they are. And they’ve been duped.

Survivors being fed into the mouth of this thing for multiple go-arounds is just one of the many moral crimes the administration has committed. The pivotal perversion is that anyone has been sent at all, but, outside of Phillipe shouting a little bit, Pearce mostly looks the other way. She only dabbles in outrage. For a filmmaker with so much promise, that’s not nearly enough.

"Stop-Loss," as you might expect, has moments of severe violence, including a child being shot during the ambush. There's also a lot of profanity, as there should be, given the subject matter. The only thing it lacks is ideas.

Paul Tatara

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