Review: Stop-Loss
Kimberly Peirce Follows Up Boys Don't Cry with Anti Iraq-War Movie
Stop-Loss fails to learn from the mistakes of recent failures such as Lions for Lambs and Redacted.
Director Kimberly Peirce’s new anti-Iraq War film, Stop-Loss, fails for essentially the same reason that most of the recent batch of Iraq pictures do: it makes no attempt at subtlety. Peirce’s previous film, 1999’s critically acclaimed Boys Don’t Cry, was decidedly not subtle, but the subject matter was a difficult and shocking one that is rarely visited in movies, so it benefited from an in-your-face, visceral approach. With Stop-Loss, the struggles soldiers face once back home is a theme commonly frequented in movies, so audiences know the clichés coming in. A delicate approach favoring smarts over heart would have been more effective, but Peirce chooses to stage this coming-home tale as a melodrama, therefore losing credibility.
Losing Credibility
A big problem is that the main character is an obvious mouthpiece for the movie’s anti-war message. During a heated argument over his own fate, Brandon King (Ryan Phillipe) yells to his parents, “with a shortage of guys and no draft, they’re shipping back soldiers who’re supposed to be gettin’ out.” One gets the clear sensation that such lines are intended for the audience to understand and nod, rather than for Brandon’s father.
Stop-Loss also suffers from more than a few misplaced war/soldier montages. They usually excuse themselves by using the point of view of the soldiers’ cameras, but the disguise is thin; these are music videos dropped into the movie for cool factor. One quite literally starts playing in the middle of the movie and is later explained as a video on a soldier’s laptop. These montages drag down the film’s pacing, and essentially alienate everyone but the so-called “MTV generation” viewers.
The movie also has some story issues. Some characters, like Joseph-Gordon Levitt’s Tommy Burgess, are one-dimensional tragic figures, never developed, and only visited when there’s a perceived need to push the audience’s sad button. Some of the relationships, like that between Brandon and his best friend’s fiancée, Michelle (Abbie Cornish), take significant screen time but go absolutely nowhere. Considering that at least 50% of the movie is a road trip between the two, something should happen between them. Nothing. Their relationship starts and ends the same way, and encounters little fluctuation in between.
The Good
Stop-Loss’s greatest strength, however, is its opening. Stop-Loss opens with 10 or 15 minutes of warfare before the return home. This battle scene is the most impressive that has been made about the Iraq war and represents some of the best battle footage in recent years. Even though the scene is missing in intensity, it has what few battle scenes have: clarity. You can actually follow what is going on. You know who the American soldiers are, whom their targets are, who is where, and why everyone is going where they are going at all times. This is extremely rare in battle scenes. Some would argue that war films often try to emulate the confusion of being on the battlefield; that or they are clumsily edited. You wouldn’t need any such excuses for Stop-Loss’s battle scene.
At the end of the day, Stop-Loss is a highly flawed good movie. The melodrama works at many points throughout, and it isn’t difficult to feel sympathy for Brandon’s plight. And, what props the film from mediocre failure to “flawed but good,” is its ending. It doesn’t take the easy way out, and the final images are strangely powerful. Not in a way that “makes sense,” but in a way that the best movie moments are; they sum up the feelings of the movie and emotionally conclude the film without a word.
