"Stop-Loss": Impassioned Awfulness and Bludgeoned Subtlety

"Stop-Loss" is like a sexy 90s-era WB TV show about the least sexy, least 90s topic imaginable It's a morality tale about the death of morality, a movie that's dreadfully sentimental when it comes to personal relationships but endlessly skeptical about everything else - the government, the war, patriotism, Texas pride. It only really figures out its central conflict later in the film, after trying out several different genres like so many clothes in a dressing room - it's a war movie, it's a vacation movie, it's a road movie, it's a buddy movie, it's a romance. The pieces don't fit together one bit. This is the kind of movie that casts Ciarin Hinds - who might be the greatest character actor working right now (he was Julius Caesar in "Rome," a Putin-ish Russian Prez in "The Sum of All Fears," an Israeli hitman in "Munich," and the silent partner in "There Will Be Blood") - as the main character's father, and then scarcely finds any use for him. But it's also the kind of movie that casts a bunch of attractively beefcake actors, and just when you're ready to write this off as "Varsity Blues" with PTSD, you watch them give the most heartbreaking performances in years.

That's the main thing about "Stop-Loss" - it's one of those rare movies ("Juno" was another one) that gets better and better as it goes along. After a horrifying battle sequence set in Iraq, the movie shifts forward in time, and we see soldiers coming home to Texas - some for leave, some for good. For what is probably just about twenty minutes but plays like five hours, we see the soldiers readjusting to life back home. That their anxiety-prone actions are disturbing (excess drinking, spousal abuse, battle flashbacks) doesn't make them any less cliché. But then Ryan Phillippe returns his gear, only to find out that he's being sent back to Iraq against his will - "Stop-Lossed," in the army's legalese-inflected jargon. He goes AWOL and decides to drive to Washington DC to plead his case to a senator. He's taking his time though - visiting a dead soldier's family, stopping by a military hospital to say hi to a particularly FUBAR'd compatriot, and more.

The road trip is the heart of the movie, and although most of the tension seeps out of it quickly, it's an unbroken stretch of brilliance. At one point, Phillippe meets another Stop-Lossed soldier on the run, living off the grid in shitty motels, so fearful of discovery that he can't even take his sick child to a hospital. It's like a demented horror film vision of modern day America - a man and his family on the run, for the crime of fighting an enemy who wasn't even attacking us.

In a sense, the road trip section of the film is almost like an updated version of "Apocalypse Now" - episodic scenes of devastation (emotional rather than physical) - except that Pierce's open-ended conclusion can't quite discover the near-mystical horror of Coppola's film. The film, despite a powerful set-piece in a graveyard, trails off, but you can't really imagine it any other way. This is a bravura B-picture that's more important, more vividly about the here and now, than practically any other film made since 9/11. Give it some props.