Stop-Loss

a review by Sam Osborn

In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, Redacted, Lions for Lambs, and now Stop-Loss. It’s been proven over the last year with the failures piling higher and higher: these films about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan just aren’t very good. None of them are particularly bad, which makes it all the more mystifying as to why we don’t care for them. It’s maybe a symbol of this generation’s bland annoyance with the government’s blunders. Previous generations would be enraged by America’s current foreign situation. We find it blandly obnoxious. Put a bumper sticker on our cars? Sure. But hold a sign at a rally? I’d rather just vote for somebody new when November rolls around.

But Stop-Loss falls even lower on the moralistic totem pole than the other, loftier message pictures. The statistics and figures planted at the film’s end tell us of the leagues of soldiers called back into action after being promised their safe exit from the military. Soldiers like those played by Ryan Phillipe and Channing Tatum in the film, released back to their Texas hometowns only to be “stop-lossed” back into action. Well it’s a sad story, but let’s not pretend stop-lossing’s a crime. Writer/Director Kimberly Pierce (Boys Don’t Cry) largely ignores the politics and logic behind the stop-lossing privileges of the government. If soldiers weren’t called back into action when deemed necessary, an involuntary draft would have to reinstated. Stop-Lossed soldiers signed up for the military. It’s their contractual duty to serve.

Message pictures work best when the broad politic of the film is funneled into a deeply personal human tale. Stop-Loss works best when it limits itself to this brand of storytelling. All the players involved—Ryan Phillipe, Channing Tatum, and Joseph Gordon Levitt—are each brutally convincing portraits of good ole’ Texas boys. They’re strong-willed males broken by what they’ve seen and done. They said they could go to war and they did. Now returned, there’s a clouding behind their eyes, a disturbance that we can feel. Their function in a civilian’s society is stunted after their role as soldiers. They’re gorillas playing in a glass house. Ms. Pierce renders these stories affectively, reminding us of the prodigious understanding of male friendship and brotherhood she proved eight years ago with Boys Don’t Cry. With Stop-Loss, she muddies this effort with a ham-handed politic. A message that is easily arguable and potentially backwards. Like many message pictures, she lets the slants and spins of editorial filmmaking get in the way of the honest stuff.

Stop-Loss: Directed by Kimberly Pierce. Written by Kimberly Pierce and Mark Richard. Starring Ryan Phillipe, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Channing Tatum. MPAA Classification: R