SXSW Movie Review: Stop-Loss
Directed and co-written by Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry, The Last Good Breath), Stop Loss dramatizes the U.S. military’s “stop-loss” policy that allows the military to postpone the honorable discharge of U.S. soldiers and send them back to Iraq and Afghanistan for another tour of duty (usually a year to eighteen months). Alas, Stop Loss proves the adage that “good politics don’t make good art.” Stop Loss suffers from a serious case of implausibility and contrivance that fatally undermines whatever insight Peirce hopes to shed on the stop-loss policy and its unfairness toward the soldiers who serve in the U.S. military in foreign countries.
Sergeant Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe), leads his men, including his best friend, Sergeant Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum), Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Isaac ‘Eyeball’ Butler (Rob Brown), Al ‘Preacher’ Colson (Terry Quay), and Rico Rodriguez (Victor Rasuk), down an alley to hunt down suspected terrorists or insurgents in Iraq. Pinned down in an ambush, King loses several men, but saves Shriver and Rodriguez from almost certain death. With his tour of duty almost done, King returns to his small hometown in Texas. There, he receives the Bronze Star for his bravery in saving his men and a Purple Heart for injuries sustained in combat. After celebrating with Shriver, Burgess, Shriver’s fiancé, Michelle (Abbie Cornish), his parents, Ida (Linda Emond) and Roy (Ciarán Hinds), King returns to the army base for debriefing.
At the army base, King learns he’s been “stop-lossed” by the military under orders from the executive branch. He has only a few days before he has to return to Iraq for another tour of duty. King refuses, forcing his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Boot Miller (Timothy Olyphant), to send him to the stockade. King manages to escape and convinces Shriver to stall while he drives to Washington, D.C., to see Orton Worrell (Josef Sommer), a senator who, days earlier, offered to help King with any problems he might encounter stateside as thanks for his heroism in Iraq. A fugitive from the law, King accepts help from an unlikely source, Michelle, who offers to drive him to Washington, D.C.
As drama, Stop Loss has more than its share of problems, beginning the moment King refuses to return to Iraq, disobeying his commanding officer, and becoming a fugitive. His decision to refuse the stop-loss order comes quickly, with insufficient provocation or motivation. King’s decision to seek help from Senator Worrell reeks of desperation and naïveté. It becomes a quixotic journey to nowhere, with stops along the way for King to get into a violent confrontation with several thugs, a visit with the family of one of the men who served under him in Iraq but didn’t return, and potential intimacy with Michelle. King also conveniently runs into another soldier who decided to flee with his family rather than get stop-lossed back to Iraq and frequent bouts of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which hits the returning soldiers to varying degrees and at various times (all of them inconvenient for them, but convenient for the plot).
Thematically, Stop Loss is muddled and, at times, incoherent. While Peirce deserves credit for tackling a potentially divisive subject, she does herself or the subject any favors by turning her characters into mouthpieces for her opinions about the Iraq War and the continuing occupation of Iraq by the U.S. military. Certainly, she wants to personalize and humanize the stop-loss issue for American audiences, but unfortunately, the characters veer too much into caricature to convince anyone on the right side of the political divide that they’re wrong. Of course, risks are always involved when filmmakers feel compelled to tackle current events. Too often, characters become secondary to themes or messages. Here, the message seems to be more a plea for compassion for soldiers in the military and an end to the stop-loss policy that puts men and women in danger well after their tours should have ended.
Ultimately, Peirce tries to have it both ways: she wants to criticize the stop-loss policy as fundamentally unfair to the men and the women who serve in our military and their families due to the increased mental, emotional, and physical costs incurred by an additional tour of duty, but also wants to reaffirm the ideals of duty, honor, and loyalty as worth having and defending, regardless of the circumstances and the politics. It’s a noble sentiment, but one that has little connection to the real world and the current administration’s military policy, specifically the still-ongoing “surge” that added 30,000 troops to ground forces in Iraq (some of whom were stop-lossed into remaining in or returning to Iraq).
Dan Clowes To Write Paul and Michel Gondry’s Animated Movie
Last year Michel Gondry let word leak that he and his 16-year-old son Paul are working on an animated film. Last week got the chance to speak to Gondry in San Francisco, and learned that Dan Clowes, the comic book artist, best known for the film adaptation of Ghost World, is writing the film’s screenplay. Clowes and Michel Gondry have discussed collaborating on a film adaptation of Rudy Rucker’s novel Master of Space and Time, which has been in development heck since 2004. This would be their first collaboration.
“It’s based on [Gondry’s son Paul’s] universe. He’s a sixteen year old. He’s very unique, very funny and very violent in his drawing and his art, showing everything that you could think of that I should have stopped him from coming in contact with, but I failed. He grew up watching Tom & Jerry and Ren and Stimpy, Sponge Bob. If you take all that and mix it with Gangster movies with blood, you get his universe.”
“We’re translating our relationship into a futuristic story with a dictator and a rebel. He’s the dictator in the story and it will be based on his art.”
Gondry also told me that the film is titled Migel Munya (SP? Gondry’s French accent sometimes hakes him difficult to understand). So what is the movie about?
“[The movie is] about a dictator who runs a crazy world where hair is the source of energy. The people there are forced to create art, and if the art is too good they are executed. So the dictator there doesn’t want anyone to be better than him so he kills the inmates who make good art. They try to make rubbish art but sometimes the worse it is for them, the better it is for the dictator.”
Paul Gondry is a published comic book author who splits his time between New York and Paris. In July 2007, Paul made an animated music video for the Southern California garage band the Willowz. Titled “Take a Look Around”, director-file described it “a sometimes-gory tale of war between robotic soldiers and mutants, with a heaping helping of apocalypse and anti-consumerism.” Watch that video.