Kimberly Peirce (2008)
Kimberly Peirce had a success greater than the film deserved with Boys Don’t Cry (1999). She may do it again with Stop-Loss, again because she has chosen a subject that’s hard to overlook: the legend at the end tells us that, since 2001, 650,000 US troops have served in Afghanistan or Iraq and that 81,000 of them have been on the receiving end of ‘stop-loss’, the involuntary extension of their military service. (Plenty of these soldiers go AWOL and feel forced in some cases to buy escape to Canada or Mexico – even there, they may face the threat of extradition.) Stop-Loss tells the story of one such soldier: Brandon King (same forename as the Hilary Swank character in Boys Don’t Cry), played by Ryan Phillippe. The opening scenes of King and his company in Tikrit are powerful: Peirce and her cinematographer, the celebrated Chris Menges, shoot much of this from the soldiers’ point of view and give a nightmarish, immediate sense of their never knowing where the next sniper bullet or grenade is coming from – as well as showing the horrific outcomes of their set-to with insurgents (and their women and children).
But it quickly becomes clear, on the soldiers’ return home on leave, that Mark Richard and Peirce, who co-wrote the screenplay, aren’t able to draw characters except by having them speechify. After the action transfers to Texas, Peirce keeps inserting pieces of video recordings made by the soldiers in Iraq; the more she does this, the more it sticks out as a device and – given how upsetting the images are – becomes offensive as such. Whether because Peirce wants to create a larger canvas or because of the shallow writing (or both), the film drifts into something more generic: the returned soldiers crack up in unsurprising ways; the destruction of the brothers-in-arms-since-they-were-kids friendship between Brandon and his friend Steve (Channing Tatum) is worked out in a tired way (‘I don’t know who you are any more’, etc), culminating in a floridly improbable brawl at the graveside of Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), another soldier in the company, who has taken his own life. (You know what’s coming as soon as he walks away from the camera, reprising the song he composed and sang during the opening titles.)
Ryan Phillippe’s clear-eyed, square-jawed look makes him well suited to playing men in uniform and he’s a good enough actor to express the mental conflicts such men are experiencing (even if, after Crash and Flags of Our Fathers, he’s in some danger of becoming typecast). It’s not clear from this performance if Phillippe has the range to carry a film (but, then, it is clear by now that Leonardo DiCaprio hasn’t …) Phillippe has a good rapport with the audience; you keep rooting for him; but the script is too thin to let him give a full sense of what it means to this honourable and successful (purple heart-winning) soldier to feel compelled to disobey orders, destroy his career and find himself on the run. The best moment is in a motel room when King, beaten up (although still the winner) in a solo fight with three lowlifes who break into his car, tries to put stitches in his eyebrow and Michele (Abbie Cornish), who has come on the road with him, offers to help. Phillippe’s painful resistance and tentative yielding to her beautifully express King’s pride and increasing loneliness. The cast also includes Ciaran Hinds as King’s father, Linda Emond as his mother and Mamie Gummer as Tommy’s girlfiend. (Some of the relationships in the film are less clearly explained than these ones.)
1 April 2008
