Ten years after her tear-jerking debut, "Boys Don't Cry" (1999), director Kimberly Peirce returns to the film scene with the Iraq war drama "Stop-Loss." While the public has recently been barraged by an onslaught of Iraq war movies, "Stop-Loss" deals with an issue few people know about: the tendency of today's personnel-starved, post-draft era military to double or triple soldiers' tours of duty, exceeding their original contracts.
The film starts out strong with a home-video style sequence showing the men goofing off in camp that quickly cuts to a scene depicting Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) and his team of Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum), Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and others as they chase insurgents from an Iraqi checkpoint directly into an ambush. The scene hits the viewer with a gripping intensity that connects us to these soldiers. Five minutes ago they were joking about girls, and now, amidst the carnage, it's unclear how many of them are still alive.
Most of the soldiers survive and go to King and Shriver's Texas hometown on leave. The men return with damaged psyches that begin to unravel before the eyes of their wives and families. One night, Shriver gets severely intoxicated, hits his fiancée Michele (Abbie Cornish), digs a fox hole in the front yard and sleeps there cradling a .45.
Burgess's drinking also spirals out of control, and his wife kicks him out. Amidst this emotional upheaval, King discovers that instead of having fulfilled his duty to his country, the army has had him "stop-lossed" and plans on shipping him back to Iraq. King, unlike Shriver, can't imagine "banging out another tour" and decides to go AWOL and plead his case in Washington. Michele joins him on this cross-country excursion after she has a falling-out with Steve over his willingness to sign up for another year in Iraq.
At this point "Stop-Loss" begins to lose steam. Watching Cornish and Phillippe take a road trip simply doesn't exactly engage the audience. In addition, the plot takes an overly melodramatic turn that diminishes the genuine empathy one feels for the characters during the first 45 minutes of the movie. This drawback aside, it is clear that "Stop-Loss" is not anti-war but pro-soldier.
Arguably, the most riveting part of the film involves watching these boys wage an internal war to regain some semblance of normal life. They enlisted with the idea of defending their country after Sept. 11 and now find themselves fighting a completely different war in a different country. This is no grand war fought on the vast expanse of desert. Battles take place in urban dwellings, hallways, rooftops and alleys where every other person is an innocent civilian. The effects of such a war are visible in Philippe's eyes, which have a haunted look, and Tatum's involuntary jaw clench.
Tommy Burgess shows the strain most clearly. He looks the youngest, which makes the image of him toting a gun the most jarring. He also relies the most on the structure the military life gives him. When a senior officer calls him in to rebuke him for excessive drinking, Levitt breaks down, pleading with the officer not to discharge him. The scene highlights the irony of being a solider: You sign up to protect home and country, but the experience forever alters your ability to function in those places. The longer you are enlisted, the more dependent you become. Because it destroys everything else, it becomes the only place where you belong.
