Stop-Loss (2008, USA)

Watching Stop-Loss I realized all over again why The Deer Hunter is three hours long. There’s a lot of story here, and sometimes it feels a shame to squish it all into a running time half Hunter’s length. Ryan Phillipe is Brandon, a staff sergeant who, with his best friend Steve (Channing Tatum), has just completed a hellish tour in Iraq. Upon turning in his papers, Brandon learns that he’s been stop-lossed, and has less than a month before returning to the war zone. With Steve’s fiancée Michelle (Abbie Cornish) in tow, Brandon goes AWOL across the U.S. in search of a way out of his situation.

I really wish it hadn’t taken Kimberly Peirce ten years to make her second film. There’s a lack of female directors, of any directors, really, who can tackle material the way that she does. One of the most impressive things about this film and Boys Don’t Cry is the way that Peirce is able to depict small-town life in America, places that only have one bar and one high school, where everyone knows one another and an individual’s business can become the business of an entire community. That’s a strength of Stop-Loss, as is the generally impressive cast (Tatum still just seems like muscle to me, but I guess he manages his narrow role well enough), led by Phillipe, whose shaky Texas accent can’t entirely derail a strong performance. Bonus points for casting Joseph Gordon-Levitt, though the story gives him precious little to do but roam around town with a bottle in his hand.

The film is more than a bit preachy at times, but it’s hard to imagine how a movie about a war that’s still going on wouldn’t end up that way. The good thing is that there’s plenty here to see beyond the preachiness, and it’s certainly affecting. I wish that the life of the town and how it had been affected by the war in Iraq had been delved into more, but what’s here is strong, and worth a watch.