The war movie is one of the oldest and most entrenched genres in film. Since All Quiet on the Western Front, war films have largely pursued an antiwar agenda under the aegis of the mantra “war is hell.”
| Stop-Loss   out of fiveDirected by Kimberly Peirce. Starring Ryan Phillipe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Channing Tatum, Ciaran Hinds. |
It has long seemed that there were no new depths to plumb, especially after Steven Spielberg and Terrence Malick seemed to reach the pinnacle of the conventional war film simultaneously in 1998 with Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line.
But give credit where credit is due: the same new American cinema willing to tackle other difficult and controversial issues (cf. Rendition, Blood Diamond, etc.) has now taken the Iraq war head-on with Stop-Loss, which follows a trio of soldiers from a deadly ambush in Iraq back home to Texas, where they find they are to be returned to Iraq, despite having fulfilled their enlistment contracts, under the stop-loss policy.
Brandon (Ryan Phillipe) wants to fight the stop-loss order, but when the military proves callously indifferent to his arguments, he sees his options whittled down to exile in either Canada or Mexico, or submission to the caprices of the armed forces and another tour of duty in Iraq. His close friends Steve (Channing Tatum) and Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), meanwhile, are having personal problems of their own.
Director Kimberly Peirce demonstrated with Boys Don’t Cry that she is willing to take a long and penetrating look at serious issues, and Stop-Loss is a worthy inheritor of that agenda. Not since Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket has the mind-set of the military received such an unflinching appraisal and, even then, soldiers were mostly confined in their interactions to other soldiers. Stop-Loss takes a new tack, leaving actual combat entirely out of the picture (except for the opening scene in Iraq, which for its hot, young, all-star cast as much as for its frank depiction of urban warfare, evokes Black Hawk Down) to dwell instead on the problems these damaged men face upon trying to reintegrate into civilian society.
The performances are solid on every front, although Channing Tatum and Ryan Phillipe seem here and there to be struggling to keep up to par with the talented Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Abbie Cornish turns in a wonderful performance as Steve’s fiancée, who is unable to come to grips with the idea of her beau going back to Iraq, and ends up helping Brandon try to escape the stop-loss order. Ciaran Hinds also appears briefly as Brandon’s father, a Vietnam veteran unsure how to deal with a son who seems afraid to return to war.
Most touching of all is Brandon’s visit to a squad-mate, Rico (Victor Rasuk), who has just been transferred to a stateside hospital. Having shielded Tommy from an RPG explosion in the opening ambush, Rico is missing his legs, one arm, and the sight in both eyes. Nevertheless, in contrast to the violent Steve and the drunken, unstable Tommy, Rico expresses his happiness and gratitude to be alive, even with severe facial burning that prevents him from spending time in the sun.
If Stop-Loss does one important thing, it is to update the image of the archetypal war veteran and bring war movies in general into the 21st century. In the movies, soldiers in combat have always been brash, brave young men (whether they took after the explosive derangement of “Bunny” in Platoon or Kirk Douglas’s level-headed Col. Dax in Paths of Glory); but the iconic veteran has remained a grizzled old man, always ready to spout either sardonic, world-weary advice or shell-shocked, horrified delusion.
What’s more, that the YouTube generation has come of age is finally apparent as the action cuts intermittently to digital footage of everyday life the soldiers have shot themselves on hand-held cameras, and the tribute videos they made for their comrades who died in action. Stop-Loss won’t rewrite the war movie canon any more than it will rewrite the history books, but if the zeitgeist of 2008 and all its attendant dissent over the Iraq war was to be captured in a film, this would be the one.
Mostly, it’s just nice to see a new side of the war movie, one drenched less with blood than emotion and resolve, and with the grit to move beyond “war is hell” and tackle long-neglected aspects of the war on . . . well, war.