Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here. Fabfunk sent me this one with a review of another film (RATATOUILLE) that’s already out, but I missed it originally in my inbox. As I was trying to clean it up this weekend, I found it in there, so I thought I’d just cut off the RATATOUILLE stuff and offer up this, a very early look at the new film from the director of BOYS DON’T CRY. I find it amazing that this is the second review we’ve run for this one that has suggested that the lead is so severely miscast that it cripples the film. Harsh stuff, but it seems to be something that leaps out at the people who see it:
Speaking of the year’s best, I also caught a test screening of one of this year’s Oscar hopefuls, Kimberly Pierce’s “Stop Loss”. This screening was a couple of weeks ago, as the film’s been bouncing around in my head, and I still don’t know what to think. As is, it was a rough version of the film that still needs to be trimmed and tightened, though I recommended that one of the best ways to improve it would be to just recast. To make such a serious, topical film like this and have Ryan Phillippe and Channing Tatum as the leads is some form of sabotage. For the uninitiated, “Stop Loss” is a term used by the military whenever they choose to re-deploy soldiers that have already been sent home. Soldiers are contractually obligated to return, even if their tour is over, a tactic used to reduce drop-out rates. In short, it’s a backdoor draft. The film deals with the actions of one soldier (Phillippe), who reacts to his stop/loss by going AWOL in a quixotic road trip to meet with politicians who might let him out of his contract. Along the way, he finds himself at odds with the ideals of his Texan friends who also enlisted, particularly a childhood friend (Tatum) who lives by the flag and dies by the flag. Halfway through the movie, I was hoping it would turn into a DTV-style action picture, with a shirtless Phillippe (again auditioning for badass status) fighting off government officials tracking him across the US with fists and feet. Alas, it remains interested in issues of patriotism, loyalty and duty. It’s not nearly as political as one might hope, but in the end that may be a good thing- Pierce keeps the human issues upfront where they belong, and there’s no serious amount of Bush-bashing. The Texas world these characters live in is decidedly conservative, backwoods, and as politically backwards as most libs would expect- one returning soldier echoes his compatriots and opines that the war would end if only America had the guts to bomb the Middle East out of existence- but it’s also very real, very human, and an essential component to creating a believable place this story would exist in. A lot of people will discuss the beginning potion, where we are put in Iraq without any table-settings, thrust into a violent firefight in which many of the leads find themselves fighting against faceless enemies. It’s shockingly intense and a very effective way to establish the film’s fatalistic mood. From there, we see the other soldiers, although, beyond Phillipe and Tatum, they’re fairly trite. One, Victor Razuk (“Raising Victor Vargas”) has a couple of limbs blown off and is completely blind, and another, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is so transparently the “tragic” one that anyone can predict what will happen when he passes out drunk after about three minutes of screentime. Like I said, however, it’s a work in progress. There was a temp score in place, and there’s some clearing up to be done regarding the relationship between Phillippe and his attractive assistance, Abbie Cornish (everyone in the audience seemed to believe they were brother and sister for half of the film because there’s scant explanation). But maybe it can be carved into an interesting film hampered by stilted lead performances instead of a mildly interesting jumping off-point for discussion about the soldiers overseas. Hey, I’m Fabfunk!
