Soldier boys: Channing Tatum (left) and Ryan Phillippe

Review

Stop-Loss

by Sean Burns

Comprised of bitter, beautifully observed truths butting up uncomfortably against loads of hoary Hollywood hooey, writer/director Kimberly Peirce’s extremely well-meaning Stop-Loss attempts to battle the trend of audience indifference toward Iraq War dramas. But the movie’s real war is with itself.

Lord knows, even at its worst, Stop-Loss remains light years more accomplished than the hand-wringing speeches we were subjected to in In the Valley of Elah, or any of the unintentionally comedic howlers that plagued Jessica Biel and 50 Cent’s barely released Home of the Brave. I realize this might be damning with faint praise, but it’s a start.

Ryan Phillippe stars as Brandon King, a decorated staff sergeant who gets a hero’s welcome and a purple heart upon returning to his Texas hometown. Along with fellow vets and hard-drinking good-ol’-boys Steve (Channing Tatum) and Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), he wrestles with posttraumatic stress symptoms and occasional flashbacks to a vicious battle in Tikrit that’s left these old friends scarred both physically and emotionally.

Brandon hears a lot of patriotic lip service and false promises from an oily Texas senator (Josef Sommer), but none of that comes in as handy as he’d hoped when his sinister lieutenant colonel (Deadwood’s Timothy Olyphant, depressingly one-note) tells our boy he’s been stop-lossed, and thus will be shipping back to Iraq in short order.

Often called “the backdoor draft,” this shameful way in which our country takes advantage of the men and women who have volunteered to serve is more than a worthy subject for a film. But the problems begin to arise when Peirce starts piling on the Tinseltown baloney, contriving a ridiculous scenario in which Brandon doesn’t just pick a fight with his commanding officer and end up AWOL—he also must become the focus of a manhunt, hitting the highway for a ridiculous road trip with his best friend’s girl (Abbie Cornish).

Such melodramatic machinations might feel a bit less jarring if Peirce hadn’t already established such a powerful air of verisimilitude. As evidenced in her debut film, the slightly overrated Boys Don’t Cry, here’s a filmmaker who instinctively understands the rhythms and customs of small-town America. Phillippe, Tatum and Gordon-Levitt don’t feel at all like pretty-boy movie stars pretending to have accents, and the meandering early portions of Stop-Loss have the lived-in sureness of similar moments in The Deer Hunter, one of this picture’s obvious role models.

Peirce claims to have based a lot of the film on the experiences of her baby brother, and there’s a scary sting of truth when we come upon the drunken, tormented Tatum digging holes for cover in his front lawn, and in the haunted, faraway gaze of Gordon-Levitt, spiraling into a self-destructive stupor. Had Stop-Loss stayed in Texas and really taken a hard look at the struggles these boys face trying to rejoin the community, we’d probably be talking about one of the best films of the year.

Instead we’re asked to swallow a preposterous forbidden romance between Phillippe and Cornish, which feels like an episode of Dawson’s Creek spliced into Born on the Fourth of July. Brandon’s fugitive status seems enforced only at the screenplay’s whims. Sometimes he needs to hide, while other times he’s visiting buddies in VA hospitals and openly attending funerals. Also, the less said about a scene in which Phillippe goes Rambo on a couple of muggers, the better.

A shame, because there’s a lot of fine work lurking just behind the boneheaded story decisions. The suddenly ubiquitous actor Ciarán Hinds gets just a handful of moments as Brandon’s Vietnam vet father, but his anxious eyes say more than any monologue ever could. Gordon-Levitt continues to impress, finding unexpected angles on a character that could have easily become a cliche. Phillippe bears the brunt of the movie’s mistakes, but he’s still slowly growing into a dependable lead.

Well-shot with searingly bright reds, whites and blues by the great cinematographer Chris Menges, Stop-Loss has no shortage of good intentions and political urgency. It just needed a little more common sense.

Stop-Loss