Boys Don’t Cry writer-director Kimberly Peirce roars back onto the screen with her first movie since that LGBT classic broke through the mainstream. Her new movie, the long-awaited Stop-Loss, is no less riveting and again explores a difficult subject—the war in Iraq—from a very humanistic viewpoint. In the last year, Iraq war movies have not fared well with the public—Rendition, Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, Grace Is Gone, and a host of documentaries have all failed to shake the public out of their torpor and none has done well at the box office. But maybe now the time is ripe—we’re actually in the election year, not the one before it, and we’ve just passed the five year mark in this war that no one seems able to define. Perhaps Stop-Loss, which deals with yet another terribly unjust U.S. policy, will finally spearhead a Stop the Insanity movement aimed at what has, upon reflection, seemed like so much smoke and mirrors. If nothing else, by the time the credits roll, audiences will at least have been enlightened about this grossly unfair practice while being enthralled by Peirce’s searing, gritty drama.
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Pictured: Kimberly Peirce directs Ryan Phillippe in Stop-Loss.
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Peirce plunks us down in Tikrit, Iraq in what is labeled ‘Episode 312.’ When they’re not trying to ferret out suspected terrorists from real terrorists, going on maneuvers, manning check points, etc., many of the soldiers in Sgt. Brandon King’s (Ryan Phillippe) outfit—which includes his best friends Steve (Channing Tatum), Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Rico (Victor Rodriquez) and many others—have used their digital camcorders and cell phones to document the war and the downtime of which ‘Episode 312’ is just the latest. Almost as soon as we get our bearings, Peirce tosses us into the terrible incident that will overshadow the rest of the movie—and Brandon’s life. He and a group of his soldiers are ambushed after following terrorists down an alley and as they pursue them through a civilian apartment building. The sequence is cut like dozens of action films we’ve seen and enjoyed in other movies. (Peirce would direct one helluva blockbuster.) But this time the good vs. bad guys stuff isn’t quite so cut and dried, and Peirce shows us the messy, one-on-one, hideous kind of war that is being fought in Iraq, and the almost unbearable tension of fighting an enemy often hiding in plain sight. Though Brandon comes out of the skirmish a decorated hero, the episode is to have long-lasting psychological effects on him and his friends.
Returning to their small Texas town, Brandon is given a hero’s welcome. Family, friends and even a senator (Josef Sommer) are there to greet him. But when he’s called on to speak the words of his superior officer, Lt. Col. Boot Miller (Timothy Olyphant), ‘Sign ’em up sergeant,’ ring in his head and he falters. Though he’s done what he felt was his duty, Brandon’s reached a point where he can’t, in good conscience, exhort others to follow in his footsteps. But the worst is yet to come: On the day that he is to get his discharge papers Brandon finds that he has been ‘stop-lossed,’ a term that essentially means a backdoor draft, and he is being sent back to Iraq. But for Brandon, the policy is not just wrong—it’s criminal. So he refuses the order and decides to travel to Washington, D.C., to see if the senator will help him with his cause, and Steve’s fiancée, Michelle (Abbie Cornish) agrees to drive him there.
As the movie moves into its second half—an outlaw picture on the order of Thelma & Louise and The Last Detail—Brandon’s and his friends’ loyalties and beliefs will be tested. Peirce gives us a series of heartbreaking and eye-opening sequences that vividly show the toll of life after war for many of our soldiers: the forgotten, the permanently emotionally and physically damaged, the cost to the families, the neglect. A sequence in a VA hospital is particularly heart-wrenching. The film is helped by excellent performances by its young cast headed by Phillippe, and Peirce’s firm grasp on the actors and the material. (She researched the film for years before writing the script with Mark Richard.)
Like Grace Is Gone and The Valley of Elah, two Iraq War pictures that deserved to connect with audiences (and might still on DVD), Stop-Loss gets at you because it examines and challenges a lot of deeply cherished beliefs about patriotism and war. It’s a great war picture in the way that The Best Years of Our Lives and Coming Home were great war pictures. These movies vividly illustrate the long-term effects of war on the soldiers who do the fighting and their families but don’t insult them in the process. It honors their service but also questions (sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly) why that service was asked for to begin with. There will be complaints that the movie presents the men and women characters in stereotypical ways—and they are valid. We see no female soldiers (or closeted ones of either sex) and the female characters mostly react to the actions of their ‘men folk’ and there are some unnecessary melodramatic twists but, even with these quibbles, Peirce’s movie is very powerful.
For a lot of the American public, the war in Iraq (which just turned five years old) has itself become the realization of the shameful ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy. (It’s not just gays and lesbians that are being told to look the other way.) Stop-Loss reveals just one ugly aspect of such insidiousness.
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