Stop-Loss: B+

In Flags of our Fathers, a so-so movie made from a good book, the ghosts of war haunt the film’s heroes much as they do the modern-day American men at the center of Stop-Loss. Except in Flags, director Clint Eastwood turns the phobias, tension, and stress arising when domesticity and government-condoned killing clash into little more than an affection, a quirk (even worse, the "ethnic" hero is the one who is worst suffering). In Kimberly Pierce’s far more raw Stop-Loss, the pathos doesn’t just hover in the background, quietly awaiting its turn to take center stage and steer a plot point or character in a particular direction; instead, it burbles just beneath the surface of every frame, a seductive and tyrannical undertow lurking at the heels of every man (and woman) on screen. And occasionally that undertow can become a flash flood, drowning the unsuspecting soldiers-on-leave whom Pierce makes the subject of her camera. It’s her way of saying that warfare doesn’t live in nightmares, it lives in the soldiers who created them - digging deep into their pores, their bloodstreams, and their psyches - gutting most everything else. The process of this realization comes slowly, unspooling over 113 minutes, but as it does, it strikes, surprises and saddens you.

In the vein of this central intention, Stop-Loss is one of the most affecting dramas I’ve seen in quite a while, and a most affecting drama, period. Using the lives of Brandon King (Ryan Phillipe), his best friend Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum), Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and Steve’s fiancee Michelle (Abbie Cornish) as her expansive blank canvas, director and co-writer Pierce attempts to cram in most everything she wants to say about the current Iraq War utilizing a MacGuffan plot device (that ultimately goes absolutely nowhere) onto one movie screen. It doesn’t always work. But its efforts and expansive vision are admirable. It searches and wonders at the nature and cost of modern battle, and how that cost would inevitably warp those who are willing to pay it. For the majority of the film that doesn’t focus on Brandon’s attempt to get out of his military contract loop-hole (e.g. he’s been discharged and then, woops!, he’s beeing sent back for another tour as per the "stop-loss" clause of his agreement to the Army), we are witness to how small-town Texans come to re-adjust and re-know the boys they shipped overseas five years ago.

As a filmmaker, Kimberly Pierce has lost none of the clarity of her direction, but as a writer, she’s gotten a little rusty. As previously stated, her central conflict is a cheap one: only half-fulfilled. And her dialogue can spiral into an over-heated mess (Exhibit A: a climactic confrontation in a cemetery near the end). But the script (co-written by Mark Richard) isn’t a complete clunker, or even totally hit-or-miss; it’s a mess, but it’s effective and, on one or two choice occasions, ripely poetic. Still, it’s Kimberly Pierce the director who drives the film. This is only her second film, and it swerves past the curse of the "Sophomore Slump" with finesse, but its been heavily-influenced by her debut (and breakthrough): Boys Don’t Cry. In that movie, her gifts of expressive non-expression and ability to empathize with the rough Texas heart helped create a stunning work. In Stop-Loss they attempt much the same, and succeed only partially.

Maybe it is because so much was attempted with one movie. Sure, there is a lot going on in any given scene, and by the end there are arguably two completely different main storylines occuring simultaneously, but Stop-Loss is only one movie, and can only do so much. Ironically, when Pierce tries to weave it all together, she does: for the first half of the movie, she interweaves the domestic dramas with jumpy home-made videos of the boys’ tour (accompanied by the frenetic beats of "Bodies" by Drowning Pool, etc.) and the result is verite excellence. More often than not though, there are no such chance bridges between the gaps of the film’s many different sub-genres. Over the course of two hours, a viewer would not be wrong in labeling Stop-Loss as any (or all) of the following: a melodrama, a character study, a war film, a message movie, or a lax semi-thriller. Needless to say, the house can get pretty crowded when all these different elements start screaming at once.

For the most part, silence is maintained and embraced. The camera zooms in close on the strained and stark faces of the cast, letting their grimaces do most of the talking. It’s an admirable technique, and one of the few consistently solid aspects of the movie. Together with cinematographer Chris Menges, Pierce makes her work a propulsive entertainment, even as it starts to leap lurchingly around in the closing twenty minutes. Even when it leaps though, the movie still affects the audience. In two particular scenes, ham-fisted dialogue goes hand-in-hand with sincerity, creating a whip-lash effect that rebukes the mind but wounds the heart. Such is an overarching theme of Stop-Loss though, painful as it is to admit. (This is a movie, after all, I’ve waited quite some time to love.) In this study of post-war soldiers-turned-civilians, a lot of things slip through the cracks, and Pierce’s righteousness can sometimes get in the way of her own talent. Yet still Ryan Phillippe and his merry (or not so-) band of cohorts trudge on, their wrenching struggles a continuing testament to the toll of mass violence, and the power of this uniquely spectacular failure. Is Stop-Loss a messy, ambitious, over-reaching drama (that starts great but ends soddenly)? Probably. Does it scald, touch, and stir you? Absolutely.