Oren Moverman’s effectively affecting debut film depicts the military’s point of the spear, not one that penetrates the battlefield, but one that pierces the heart of the next of kin when the knock on the door comes. Ben Foster convinces as a wounded and decorated Iraq veteran who is assigned to serve out his enlistment as a casualty notification officer, in tandem with the reliably unreliable Woody Harrelson, as a lifer with a drinking problem that has kept him in this job since the first Iraq war. When the film remains focused on six successive families reacting to the fatal message, it seems honest and respectfully probing, a fresh and empathetic approach to the subject of war and its effects. But when it pays homage to the buddy genre and has the boys behaving badly, with the obligatory drunken tearful confessions, it seems formulaic, even if well-played. For me, in the end, the film was redeemed by the presence of Samantha Morton -- I always find her subtly involving -- as the widow of one of the dead soldiers, with whom Foster, against all regulations, forms a delicately evolving bond. (2009, dvd) *7* (MC-78)
To follow the next step in the military’s rituals of bereavement, I looked into the recent HBO movie, Taking Chance, which follows the diary of an officer who volunteers for escort duty with the remains of a soldier killed in Iraq and going home to Colorado for burial. Kevin Bacon is quite good in the role, and the unfolding of military ceremony surrounding the preparation and return of the body was definitely eye-opening, especially when you imagine it being repeated thousands of times. But finally the piety of the source material shone through HBO’s typical gloss of sophistication, with nonstop musical cues tugging hearts relentlessly, as every citizen met along the way uniformly honors the fallen. Yeah, it’s a different era, but I can imagine how a Viet vet (or current VA patient) would gag on this sugarcoated celebration of how we all support the troops.
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