{grate 3} With the catalyst of the
war as a film’s subject, you might expect a lot of soapbox thumping, idealistic
shouting and sympathetic tears dominating the next two hours of your life in
the theater seat. But in a surprising twist to today’s political toiling,
“Stop-Loss” takes on the soldier’s point of view in an apolitical and highly
personal story of one fighter’s return home from war. Helmed by the award-winning
director of “Boys Don’t Cry,” Kimberly Peirce, “Stop-Loss” is the culmination
of many soldiers’ personal stories and experiences, recorded by Peirce herself
in the town of
With her own brother fighting abroad, it’s easy to see why
Peirce has taken such an interest in the quality of life awaiting soldiers in
the
Using the vehicle of stop-loss — the involuntary extension of a service
member’s enlistment contract in order to retain them beyond the normal end term
of service — Peirce explores the strong camaraderie and love born from fighting
that exists between GIs. Sergeant Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) is our
serviceman in the spotlight, a leader who feels he has failed his men when he
accidentally leads them into a terrorist ambush. Peirce’s recorded interviews
and constant eye on the news shine through realistically in moments when King
leads his men down blind alleys and into possible terrorist strongholds.
Scene by scene, the opening tension is thick with the
ceaseless fear troops suffer throughout their patriotic duty. Born into a
patriotic family herself, Peirce said she tried to “get as deeply inside what’s
going in the soldier’s head as possible.” Rather than taking a brusque antiwar
stance, she uses stop-loss to talk about the people who are actually supportive
of the war. King’s inner struggle with serving his country and being true to
his own principles shows that “the people who have a problem with stop-loss are
patriots … and that the movie really tells the story of patriots,” Peirce
said.
The men’s utter reliance on each other is a pivotal point,
as King fights hard to relinquish his title of leader once he gets out of the
military for good. When he returns to
a decorated hero, we, along with King, learn his duties as a leader are never
actually finished. Besides being stop-lossed, he’s still responsible for the
fragile mental stability of his entire crew. Scenes where soldier Steve Shriver
(Channing Tatum) digs a trench in his front yard to huddle down for the night
and another where Tommy Burgess (the hollow-eyed Joseph Gordon-Levitt) breaks a
store window in a drunken rage merely scratch the surface of many more gaping
mental wounds somewhere inside.
King’s feelings of failure and indignant civic loyalty permeate
his need to escape the service. After going AWOL with his best friend’s girl,
King embarks on a long journey to fight for his freedom, riding the equivalent
of a Canadian underground railroad in an attempt to garner the political
support of a reticent senator. But around every corner, Peirce delves into the
shadiness of the federal government and resulting deterioration of King’s men.
It doesn’t take much to see that turning your lawn into makeshift barracks is
not what people would call a peaceful assimilation, but that doesn’t mean
anyone will do anything about it.
The pain of a soldier’s home life only seems to be worsened
by the abandonment they face at the hands of their female counterparts. In a
disappointing boggle, every woman (except for King’s mother) splits the second
there’s a whiff of trouble. From divorce to separation, every young woman in
the film seems to have little to no patience for what their man is going
through. Why? Perhaps it’s a case of going through too much shit for too long, but
it’s disheartening when a female director writes off almost every woman in her
film.
In a prettier, glossier
glow than her previous endeavor, “Stop-Loss” loses Peirce’s gritty feel of
“Boys Don’t Cry.” The film feels like a polished nugget of gentle biography
obscured in the hubbub of subtle political slant and man candy. Its message is
understood quickly enough, but the gleam of manufactured smoothness sacrifices
a jagged reality that would otherwise make the film resonate. Hilary Swank’s chiseled
jaw just has more daring than Phillippe’s delicate flounce. Opens March 28.
