Despite having thrown hundreds of millions of dollars into the effort, Hollywood’s track record on the Iraq war so far has been pretty dismal. Not only has the left coast failed to substantially impact public opinion on the subject, it’s been unable to produce anything resembling a decent movie. (Witness the failure of any of last fall’s war pics to make a substantial showing at the Oscars.) Stop Loss represents a break in at least one of these trends. Though it's doubtful it will galvanize much public support one way or another, it is, at the least, a thoughtfully produced, often legitimately stirring film.
Directed by Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don't Cry), it concerns a group of soldiers who return home to Texas after facing brutal combat in Iraq. The troops have a tough time readjusting — fights break out at a party celebrating their return, one digs sleeping holes in his front yard, another separates from his wife after failing to control his drinking problem. The squad leader, Brandon (played with blue-eyed, all-American intensity by Ryan Phillippe), intends to leave the forces, but instead he finds himself stop-lossed: sent back to Iraq through a contractual provision that allows the military to extend a soldier's tour of duty.
Hearing this, he goes haywire, stealing a buddy’s jeep and, after conferring with his supportive parents, taking a road-trip north alongside his buddy’s girlfriend Michelle (Abbie Cornish) in hopes of contacting a Senator he believes will set things straight.
Along the way, Brandon becomes increasingly unstable and even prone to violence, while the other soldiers in his unit deal with a series of escalating personal trials.
It’s all handled with surprising humanity and tact, though its storyline requires it to gloss over any number of minor — and a few major — inconsistencies.
One of the film’s problems is that it relies entirely on the notion that the practice of stop-lossing is unambiguously immoral. Now, there’s probably a debate to be had about whether soldiers who have volunteered for service should have the tours extended through the use of contractual provisions which some claim are buried in fine print, but Stop Loss doesn’t entertain that debate for an instant. Neither the soldiers in the film nor their families seem aware of the policy until it happens to them or someone they know. And as soon as it’s discovered, they leap immediately to condemning it, more or less assuming the audience will do the same.
Beyond that, the film takes a rather strong view of the traumatizing psychological effects that war has on soldiers. Perhaps the necessities of time and dramatic compression excuse some of this, but it stretches credibility to suggest, as the film seems to, that nearly every soldier who’s seen intense combat returns not just with psychological scars, but trauma so intense that it causes uncontrolled eruptions of violence.
Peirce smartly minimizes the moral grandstanding in the film. Brandon gets in a self-assured anti-Bush monologue, complete with an expletive aimed at the President that drew a cheer from the crowd during my screening. But while there can be no mistaking its anti-war stance, the film — unlike so many of the irritating political conscious-raisers that have thudded their way into cinemas as of late — mostly avoids the sense that it's merely a launching pad for a political agenda.
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