Took the afternoon to catch up on my moviegoing, and finally stop avoiding every Iraq film: I took in Stop/Loss.
I did it partly because I trust Kimberley Peirce; since Boys Don't Cry, I've admired Peirce (she's the best, most insightful thing in the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated about the MPAA ratings system) and
her abilities as a filmmaker. Stop/Loss is no exception: the film isn't easy, and it's not, necessarily even what people will say it is, and that's a credit to Peirce's intelligence and her skill as a storyteller. But Stop/Loss is flawed, and its flaws, I think, will limit both its appeal and its ability to move a discussion about Iraq, about our soldiers, and about our nation's responsibility to those who serve.
Peirce's skill as a storyteller, as in Boys Don't Cry, is readily apparent - chronicling the lives of a group of soldiers who served together in the war, she once gets in and under the life of small town middle America, the restless, familiar lives of young people with few options and lots of distractions. It's the matter of fact way in which Peirce deals with the questions of Post-Traumatic Stress, lives interrupted and put on hold, and the perilous economic state of much of the working class that give Stop/Loss enormous power. As well, Peirce here, as in Boys, shows equal skill marshaling a talented, and especially good looking cast: this may well be the handsomest troop battalion outside of gay porn ever, which is saying something. But it says more that for all their good looks,not everything here can be dismissed as merely surface; these actors deeply inhabit their roles.
Ryan Phillippe plays Brandon King, a Staff Sargeant finishing up a five year tour, coming home to his family's ranch in Texas. It's during his exit processing that he discovers that he's been "stop lossed," a term referring to a clause in the enlisted man's contract allowing the President to recall "stop excessive losses" in a time of need, such as wartime. Though the film doesn't wade deeply into the issue, many are surely well aware by now that Stop/Loss orders have affected large numbers of troops in the Iraq War (the film says 81,000 of the 650,000 troops that have served; and that there are no figures yet for the use of Stop Loss during the surge). Phillippe's character, King, reacts badly to his Stop/Loss and his bad attitude leads to a threat of imprisonment; instead Kng flees and goes AWOL with a high school friend, Michelle, who is engaged to King's best friend, also a soldier in his unit, played by Channing Tatum.
As I said, loads of good looking: Tatum and Phillippe are a total War
of the Cheekbones onscreen together, 
though Tatum bulked up for the
part, and has little of the sinewy grace that he had as a dancer in
Step Up. Still it makes sense - Tatum's character, Steve Shriver, is a
straight-up soldier, whose life is bound up in what the Army has given
to him... and made him. He returns home to a land he doesn't recognize
and proceeds to blot out his present by drinking and retreats into his
familiar past - digging a foxhole in his front yard and scaring his
fiancee with violent outbursts.
As the third member of the homecoming crew, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (like I said, cheekbones) plays the one who's most lost on his return, Tommy Burgess. And it's here where I started to realize that Stop/Loss isn't so much a War Movie as it is a Separate Peace for soldiers. Gordon-Levitt's role is heavy on the symbolism, a convert to religion in the foxhole who becomes a drunken mess-up back stateside until he winds up taking the symbolic bullet that will kill them all (he eats his shotgun). Here, I think, is where Peirce loses her way - the storylne is heavy-handed, utterly unsubtle (nice use of "Courtesy of The Red White and Blue" there, too). Believability is sacrificed to make these characters symbols for the painful way all of us ignore the damage of the war - the cost to bodies, minds, and hearts.
Believability is also sacrificed as Phillippe and Abbie Cornish (as Michelle) travel, somewhat aimlessly, in search of a solution for King. their tour of fleabag motels, down and out watering holes, and convenience store America bears all the hallmarks of gritty realism... but everything feels forced: they are on the run and afraid... but the credit cards and cell phones and other incidents raise a question of just how under the gun they are; and when King returns for Tommy's funeral, I just had to wonder how a military funeral wouldn't provide an obvious moment to catch an AWOL buddy.
That's not to say Phillippe's performance is preposterous; as with almost all of his work (including being one of the better things in Crash), Phillippe dives into the role so completely you can't help but admire his dedication and his preparation; to the extent that King seems real, it's all due to Phillippe's acting skill. But he's hamstrung early on, when we have to make the leap that causes King to reject his Stop Loss and go AWOL, it's not that Phillippe can't play it; it's just not there in the script. Tatum, too, shows his range in the way he vanishes into this character in a way that's utterly true. And Gordon-Levitt, so skilled at oddballs and misfits, makes as much as humanity in a symbolic cipher as anyone could. One also shouldn't short shrift Peirce's skill with female actors, with Linda Emond (and Brandon's Mom) and Abbie Cornish (as Michelle) doing phenomenal work at playing the real, tough women who live with the realities of their connection to the military. It's here that Peirce's work really shines.
I suspect that most people will take away from Stop/Loss the politics they bring to it: those who dislike the war and the death and the pointless violence will have what they need to bolster their case; while those who see the soldier's work as necessary, difficult - and deserving of respect, not condemnation - will see some of that here, while decrying the blatant, heavy handed presentation against the military's procedures. It's to Peirce's credit that she offers no easy answers, no obvious bad guy, and an ending that will, probably, please no one. Still, it's also an unsatisfying mix; the sense of crushing inevitability in Boys Don't Cry takes its power, I think, from knowing that the story really happened, almost entirely in the way Peirce presents it; whereas here, these are clearly fictional characters, and the story is heavily scripted and carefully staged (not to mention, yet again, so beautifully). I think we are still a long way from finding the work of fiction that can really illuminate what the war has done to us, to our army, to our sense of ourselves as a nation. I credit Peirce with trying, and with a lot of impressive elements. But it's hard to escape the sense that Stop/Loss just doesn't work, and that, really, there is no separate peace, no way to feel good about what soldiers are put through, no way to see what alternative there is, right at this moment.... it's just that inevitability and dismalness of the ending is also so contrived. As much as I wanted to find meaning in that final closeup on Ryan's baby blues... it's mostly... "nice eyes."
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