the Color of Context

Stop-Loss: Boys don’t go AWOL
Release date: 28 March 2008
By Jerilyn Covert

Hope and hopelessness go together like peace and war. One is rendered meaningless without the other. And in Stop-Loss, hope hangs like an intangible smoke and threatens to disappear at any moment. However, Sgt. Brandon King, played by Ryan Phillipe, certainly has enough emotional kindling to keep any fire burning, especially after his happy homecoming is tarnished by orders to return to Iraq against his will even though he’s fulfilled his contract with the army. When an angry speech to his lieutenant colonel proves ineffective, Brandon decides to drive to Washington D.C. with his childhood friend Michelle (Abbie Cornish) under the naïve assumption that a friendly Texas senator will help him. But as reality sets in, Brandon realizes his only real options: return to Iraq or move to Canada.

It’s been nearly a decade since the director Kimberly Peirce’s academy-award winning debut, Boys Don’t Cry. Let’s hope we can stop-loss her before she decides to wait that long again. Peirce cowrote and directed both movies (Mark Richard cowrote Stop-Loss), and different as they may seem at the outset, similarities abound. The score in Stop-Loss, for one thing, could easily have been ripped right from the soundtrack for Boys. She must love the music almost as much as she loves to juxtapose the unnatural brightness of neon or fluorescent lights against a pitch-black night, which not only heightens the dramatic effect, but creates a poetic, dreamlike world.

Once again, Peirce deals with characters who are from the south and have that southern, black-and-white sensibility, not to mention a propensity for violence and drinking. Brandon is their sergeant and leader, and evidently he’s a darn good one. But early on in the movie, he betrays his deep-seated sentimentality when, during a ceremony where he’s presented with the high honors of a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, his lieutenant colonel turns over the podium. But instead of a rallying recruitment speech, the decorated soldier falters and instead shares a story about how he noticed an onion truck on the drive home and wished he could roll down the windows and smell it, because for him, “onions smell like home.” Fellow soldier Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum) jumps to his friend’s rescue, yelling into the microphone that they fight the enemy overseas so they don’t have to do so at home. The crowd cheers. Embarrassment averted.

The bonds that tie Brandon and the other soldiers in his unit are like family. The war has had as big an impact on their friendships as it has on their psychological state and rough-and-tumble behavior. When they’re together, guns or booze or both are almost always present, which for us the viewers creates a constant sense of danger. That’s another similarity to Boys: the feeling that the other shoe is always just about to drop like a makeshift hand-grenade. And indeed, as close as they are to each other, trying to reconnect with the loved ones they’d left behind proves nearly impossible for these hometown heroes.

When Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) reunites with his wife, the thrill is overshadowed as he slowly loses control and turns to alcohol to deal with the death of his best friend, who died in his arms in Iraq. Meanwhile, Steve gets so drunk one night that he believes he is still in Iraq, digs a trench in his girlfriend’s front yard, and hunkers down with a rifle. The war’s psychological hold over Brandon emerges in the form of post-traumatic stress. In one scene, he thinks he sees a soldier drowning at the bottom of a swimming pool and dives in to rescue him, only to find there was no one there. In another, he single handedly takes down three street thugs and orders them at gunpoint to get on their knees and pray to Allah.

I am going somewhere with this, but let me pause briefly to say, in case it isn’t clear yet, that I highly recommend this movie to anyone old enough to watch an R-rated flick. Everything about it is brilliant¾ the story, the cinematography, the acting. I read somewhere that Peirce didn’t want to cast Phillipe as Brandon at first, but I’m glad she changed her mind. He and the rest of the cast delivered really good, really believable performances. A really good script helps, of course. And Peirce sure knows how to provoke our thoughts and inspiration¾ i.e., with a heavy dose of irony.

Because even though Brandon is no longer in Iraq, he apparently sometimes thinks he is. And even as he and his buddies try to resume life the way they left it, their actions in Iraq continue to haunt them at home. Gradually, lives unravel. Some lose their wives, their sobriety, and their sanity, none of which can be stop-lost as easily as their enlistment contracts. And it soon becomes clear that the army didn’t need fine print to keep Brandon from leaving. Indeed, part of him has never left Iraq, and probably never will.