Dorkgasm Gonzo Is God

All of which are American Dreams
By
Michael C. Riedlinger
Editor-In-Chief

            Stop reading now and see this film IMMEDIATELY. Still here? Damn. Stop-Loss may just be the most important film you see this year. Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry) gives us a movie that never preaches. She just shows us how the current war in Iraq affects the people who fight in it and those around them.

            The film opens with Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe, Crash) and his men in Iraq. They live with each other like brothers and have a job to do. While they are guarding a checkpoint, the mood is light, business as usual for a soldier in Tikrit, until guerillas drive by and shoot at them with small arms. They follow procedure and pursue their attackers, which lands them in an alley. Anyone who’s ever seen a Western knows an ambush when they see one, but this happens so fast and hits so hard, it takes us by surprise. The soldiers are caught off-guard as well, and suffer heavy casualties. The whole scene is more jarring than the opening of Saving Private Ryan. I felt traumatized, angry, and sad all at once, and this is due in large part to Peirce’s masterful direction and Chris Menges’ (Notes on a Scandal) skillful camera work.

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            Soon after, King and his men return home. King’s contractual obligation to the Army is up, and he is supposed to be home for good. He receives the Purple Heart and Bronze Star, and after a parade in his hometown, he is just glad to be back with his family and friends. His best friend and squad mate, Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum), isn’t readjusting to life stateside on the other hand. After getting into a fight with a civilian, he loses control and hits his fiancée before digging a hole in her front yard to sleep in, as though he were on guard back in Iraq. Clearly PTSD is affecting these men, and we couldn’t be happier that the likable Sergeant King is done with his tour of duty.

            That is, until the film’s title bites him in the ass. He gets stop-lossed, a process by which the United States Military can essentially force reenlistment upon soldiers whose service is otherwise completed. He decides to fight the system, and for a bit, the film seems less like something Peirce would direct and threatens to become the typical, “fight the system” tripe we might expect from MTV Films. Thankfully, this film is smarter than that. The MTV moniker seems to have been used only to attract a younger audience and license music, like the rap act 4TH25, a group of soldiers who recorded an album while stationed in Iraq. What could have become a road trip movie doesn’t. King thinks his plight through and decides to go to Washington and plead his case to his Senator. Along the way, he stops to visit the families of the men he lost in that last ambush in Tikrit. Here is where Peirce carefully navigates the complex issues this film demands we explore. When he visits Private Rodriguez (Victor Rasuk, Lords of Dogtown) at a V.A. hospital, he finds a friend who is blind, scarred, and missing three of his limbs, but the man is hopeful.

            Hope. That’s what was missing from The Deer Hunter a generation ago. That honesty in portrayal will likely cost Peirce any awards this year, but almost all of us know someone who has served this country in this war, and anything less would be a disservice. Stop-Loss points out that these men could run, they could complain loudly, but that all of those acts would be futile. That sense of helplessness is even more difficult to deal with if you have grown accustomed to being able to shoot a problem to make it go away. It is not an issue faced only by soldier, but by their families as well. When Shriver decides to reenlist voluntarily, his fiancée Michelle (Abbie Cornish, Elizabeth: The Golden Age) leaves him because she cannot cope with being married to a man who is never there. Other characters deal with the burden of where they have been and what they have done in even more destructive ways, and the one funeral we see even more difficult to watch than the ambush scene. Families experience loss in any war, but Kimberly Peirce shows us how this generation is dealing with that issue now. Like I said at the onset, see this movie. There may not be an easy solution in any of this, but the conversation has to start somewhere, and this is a great way to begin.