the film starts mtv style, with quick edits of faux self-made clips set to the tune of rap songs. this is followed by a nail-biting urban guerrilla action scene that is in many ways, even though it comes right at the beginning, the psychological heart of this movie (it’s the scene of the trauma). then we are back in texas, where we follow the back-home post-traumatic adventures of three soldiers, played by ryan philippe, joseph gordon-levitt, and channing tatum.
kimberly peirce directs young women beautifully. abbie cornish, who plays one of the boys’ girlfriend, is the moral conscience and the emotional anchor of stop-loss. she looks impossibly young, as do all these young people, even though some of them (gordon-levitt, the youngest-looking of all) are married and others (cornish and tatum) are about to marry. in one of the many emotion-drenched scenes, michelle (cornish) tells steve (tatum), “i’ve been waiting for 5 years!” and you find yourself doing the math, wondering how old michelle must have been 5 years before that she should have thought of marriage. but these are poor texan kids, many of them apparently parentless, and when you are poor, parentless, from texas, and army fodder, i guess you grow up fast.
while the guys go berserk or try painfully and heartbreakingly to keep it together, michelle lends a hand. she rarely, if ever, smiles. she stands serious and life-weary on her porch while her boyfriend passes out naked and armed in a trench he has dug in her front lawn; she quietly grabs the keys and gets in the car when brandon (philippe) needs a 3,000 mile ride; she listens to stories of terror and psychic breakage; she handles crisis after crisis as if she had done it all her life; she knocks back multiple shots of tequila without wincing (brandon, who’s doing the same next to her, is not as stone-faced and nonchalant). she is tough, beautiful, and a little butch. she dons leather cowboy hats and struts in jeans and boots like she means business. all the while, she looks exactly like a child.
stop-loss has much in common with boys don’t cry. michelle is counterpart to boys‘ chloë sevigny, who, too, deals with precocious aplomb with the gender-craze of a number of guys, including her transgender boyfriend (boys‘ brandon is earnest, pained, and self-contained in much the same way as stop-loss‘s brandon is). in both films, boys are asked impossible acts of overcomingness while being entirely, hopelessly stuck — in war, lies, aimlessness, and dead-end lives. this is clearly an impossible demand, especially when there’s nothing to help them but beer and guns. when booze and firearms are the only tools you hand kids to survive life in the pressure cooker, it’s guaranteed that sooner or later someone will get hurt.
Hey G–you make me want to see this more than any of the reviews I’ve read; how does it compare/contrast with the spate of other Iraq films?
i think this is somewhere in between the ground truth and in the valley of elah, though certainly closer to the latter than to the former. i find the ground truth exceptional and (politically, at least) groundbreaking, and elah very good in spite of some minor flaws (i liked it a lot more than anyone else on this blog). stop-loss is not sentimental in the way in which elah is, though peirce is not afraid to use the occasional string volley. it is, however, an earnest film, so if earnestness scares you, maybe you should wait for dvd. to its endless credit, it contains no romance whatsoever.
simon sez: [SPOILER]
the fight in the graveyard towards the end was a bit hokey. also, there were a couple of long close-ups of faces at the very end that were puzzling to me. another thing that frustrated me was that both elah and this movie don’t really address the war in itself but more the way we treat the soldiers.
arnab, could you kindly give simon his own login? thank you.
Who is this Simon of which you speak? I have heard tell that s/he is a Brit, but every able-bodied Brit is currently in Basra, saving civilization from Moqtada Al-Sadr (I am typing this from an advanced recon unit deep inside Iraq).
s/he?
s/he is a brit, fighting valiantly against the forces of darkness from a computer terminal near me. his/her efforts have so far brought no enlightenment whatsoever to this sorry, sorry world. nonetheless, s/he doesn’t give up, but keeps on trying, and trying.
Gio, let the subaltern speak for himself! Oh right, he doesn’t have a login. Does postcolonial theory allow for Brits to be silenced?
are you asking arnab? :-)
i’ve managed to silence pete.
I don’t have a lot to add to Gio’s beautiful review of this movie. There are a number of false steps (of which the graveyard scene is one of the worst), but it is ultimately a heartbreaking account of the pain and bewilderment facing US veterans of the Iraq war. There is a scene at a VA hospital when a horribly wounded member of Brandon’s platoon displays unaccountable joy at just being alive, in stark contrast to the psychological pain of his physically untouched comrades.
Gio’s reading of the Michelle character as the emotional center of the movie is plausible, but it is not obvious. Much of the movie tries to produce powerful dialogue between the members of the platoon — making it a movie about men dealing with their conflicted sense of duty, honor, friendship and fear — but the movie only really works when Michelle is present. Her quiet strength, her friendship, her sense of morality are what take this beyond another 20-something MTV take on the war. Cornish really does appear young — Charlize Theron with a little more roundness to the face — and yet runs away with the movie. And, despite at least three scenes that appear to presage romance between Michelle and Brandon, that temptation is resisted, making their scenes together all the more powerful.
I would not have watched this but for Gio’s review, and I would not have enjoyed it anywhere near as much without her reading of the Michelle character. Thanks for posting.
I will doubledown on Chris’ last paragraph: I was Iraq-movie-fatigued (meta-“traumatic-stress”-disabused), but this is by far my favorite fictional film on the war, despite the missteps mentioned by her and Chris. I was sold on this film in the first 45 minutes: the footage from the soldiers themselves, the excellent and untranslated depiction of the soldiers talking and teasing and relying upon one another, and the brutal and immediate battle in the alley.
The rest of the film banks on all that happens here, particularly the first two elements of my sentence — I’d put in a word for the way the initial footage and then subsequent interruptions by other footage keep reframing the story I’m seeing in relation to the stories these guys think they’re telling, or trying to tell. I heard an interview with Peirce (conducted by the great Elvis Mitchell) where she talked about how she’d gotten hundreds of such tapes from soldiers as she prepared (extensively) for the film, and her recreations seem absolutely true. Again, such mini-films conveyed the desire for heroism and camaraderie (the dream of war), contrasted with the confusion, the pain, the sense of rage/anger felt in an actual war.
And although the rest of the film can be ham-fisted in some of its interactions, and tends to stack the narrative deck into particularly obvious melodramatic reveals of character and character interaction (the graveyard scene most guilty of these flaws), that initial section sold me on the honest chemistry between these boys, and every other scene leaned back on such unsentimental and unforced clarity.
I will also echo the comments on Michelle (Cornish); without her, everything back home would perhaps feel …. just too much: too plotted, too earnest, too limited. She is caring for these guys, and yet she’s also a clear-eyed observer. My favorite scene is when she plays pool with another returned soldier, not someone we know–it’s a moment that is mostly without dialogue, intercut with a more “painful” (and a little pained) exposition between Brandon (Philippe) and one of his wounded fellow soldiers, and Michelle’s caring, playful connection with this other guy softened and gave a “real” edge to the more exaggerated “moment” between the other guys. (I also felt like the camera often relied upon her observations, cutting to her in scenes, wordless, her face in open scared concerned interested engagement with what’s happening–she was our [or at least my] entry into the film, not Brandon.)
Good film. Thanks for the rec, Gio.
Speaking of bringing realism to fictional depictions of the experience of US soldiers in Iraq, it will be interesting to see how effectively David Simon can pull off this ‘Generation Kill’ mini-series on HBO. Does he have an ear for dialogue of all kinds, or is he limited to the streets of Baltimore?
I’m only two episodes in, but Generation Kill is detail-drunk, and pretty damn engaging. I’m curious if–how?–they’ll pull another 8 episodes together, as there is no real narrative through-line. But I find that pretty intriguing, as–note the above–so many of the Iraq films/media have been plagued by overdetermined narrative constraints….
I was continually engaged (thought it was great actually), but it is mostly character driven. Chain of command appears to be a central, though rather open narrative concern.
God, I love Ziggy in ‘Generation Kill.’
And talk about your dialogue:
“I’d eat a mile of her shit to see where it comes from.”
Perhaps some of his soldiers are rather hyper-articulately profane, but good god it’s often astounding to listen to. And, yeah, Ziggy is a star.
generation kill’s dialogue is as perfect as the wire’s, though i have to agree with mike that these soldiers sound way smarter and more linguistically virtuosistic than is even remotely realistic. it, however, makes me sick to my stomach. i’m half-way through and i don’t know that i can watch it any more.
david simon is a genius. he captures the brutality of everything and serves it to you on a silver platter. i must say though that the wire had some relief, once in a while. in fact, all the time. this is relentless. i guess red-blooded american males might find some of the inter-soldier moments funny and tension-relieving, but i don’t. by the time one loooong episode is over, i feel like life ain’t worth livin’.