"The Messenger" Delivers - With Respect

Bryant Jordan - Military.com

It's possible to view "The Messenger," the latest Woody Harrelson vehicle, as an anti-war film.

It does, after all, give an up-close and painful view of people in the emotional instant when they learn that a loved one has been killed in war. The movie also shows the toll on the Soldiers who deliver the horrible news.

Harrelson, the iconic Woody in "Cheers" and star of the recently released "Zombieland" and the acclaimed films "Natural Born Killers" (1994) and "The People vs. Larry Flynt" (1996) is an unlikely choice to play a military character. Harrelson has never tried to hide his opposition to the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, and he acknowledged at the D.C. premier that "a chunk of my philosophy was missing … really understanding what the Soldiers were going through." By meeting with Soldiers, including in visits to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Harrelson said he came to a greater appreciation for them.

"They lay their life on the line, not because they're making a lot of money, but because they care, they care about their friends, they care about this country and whether or not you believe in the war, I believe the Soldiers are very heroic," Harrelson said in an interview after the premier. "So this was a great experience for me to kind of connect that piece of the puzzle."

"The Messenger," then, is no "Coming Home," the 1978 Jane Fonda-John Voight film about a crippled Vietnam War vet whose relationship with the rather innocent, flag-waving wife of a deployed GI opens her eyes to the craziness of the war. "The Messenger" doesn't really care what the viewer thinks about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its reach goes beyond today's headlines and grabs onto what happens to those left behind when Soldiers die.

"We keep saying we didn't make a political film," director Oren Moverman ("I'm Not There," 2007) explained to one audience member who did interpret "The Messenger" as an anti-war film. Moverman is no stranger to war and occupation, having served in the Israeli Defense Forces and taken part in the occupation of Lebanon and the Palestinian lands.

"We are saying that on purpose because we had no political agenda. What we tried to do is shine a light on the people who have to live with the consequences of the decision to go to war. …. What we wanted to do is be part of the dialogue that, more and more, we find doesn't exist. So we sparked a dialogue" with the movie.

It's a neat trick -- making a film that looks at the consequences of war without offering an opinion on the conflict -- but Moverman, who also has screenplay credit for the movie, seems to have pulled it off.

"The Messenger" is about two Soldiers, Capt. Tony Stone, played by Harrelson, and Staff Sgt. Will Montgomery, played by Ben Foster, whose credits include the mutant known as Angel in "X-Men: The Last Stand."

Stone is the committed lifer, a veteran of Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm, who now heads up a two-member Casualty Notification Team. Montgomery, decorated for heroism in Iraq but dealing with psychological and physical wounds, is the junior partner.

In at least a half-dozen scenes they deliver by-the-book notifications to a dead Soldier's family -- among them a mother in the presence of the dead Soldier's pregnant girlfriend; elderly parents who they have located in a local grocery store; a wife hanging out clothes on a drying line. They face denial, rage, pain-inspired physical assault and, in one case, an eerie acceptance that leads Stone to believe that new widow Olivia Pitterson already had a new guy in her life and bed. Stone wrestles with a number of demons, but he works the notifications by the book, literally. Everything is written down and he follows it to the letter. Conflict arises when Montgomery deviates from the Army's guidelines by trying to build a relationship with Pitterson, played by Samantha Morton, whose previous credits include "Minority Report," (2002) and "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" (2007).

"We really wanted these scenes to be strong," Moverman said, "but didn't want to exploit them -- it's very, very dangerous if you do them like television, or in ways that's all about milking the moment and [putting] the emotion out into your face. What we wanted to do was concentrate on the notifiers, about what they do."

And what Moverman did to create and capture those moments for Stone and Montgomery was shoot the notification scenes all in one take -- no cutting -- but with an added tension: Harrelson and Foster did not see or speak with the actors playing the family members they would be notifying until they did those scenes.

If the film has one flaw it is that, in its effort to show respect to those who serve and their families, it seems to set up everyone else as insensitive or simply naïve. Civilian pals of a combat vet telling a funny story from the war grow uncomfortable and silent when the tale winds down with the death of a local the guy called "Haji Ben Kenobi." The vet walks outside for a smoke, alone.

Later on, Stone and Montgomery crash the wedding reception of Montgomery's one-time girlfriend. Fresh from an all-nighter that included a fistfight with some locals, the off-duty Soldiers are very much the skeletons at the feast. They're the gate-crashers, but it's the couple and their guests who seem meant to come off as unsympathetic because it is obvious no one has a clue about the military or war. And when the groom rises to make a toast to "support the troops," his attempt to honor Soldiers comes across as empty, even if genuine.

This is a movie worth seeing no matter what one's opinion is on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "The Messenger" is 105 minutes long. It opens in New York City and Washington on Nov. 13 and across the country Nov. 20.

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