FILM REVIEW: The Messenger
© A.J. Malouin 2009
(Rating: 6 by The Film Snob.)
(See our side-bar page “How Caryl & Al and The Film Snob Rate Movies”)
(2009/USA. Directed and co-written by Oren Moveman.)
What a dichotomy “The Messenger” is! Worth seeing, yet totally unsatisfying. Packed with talented actors and as timely as the over-night obituaries, this film nevertheless never really moves from Point A to Point B, or beyond. Like Captain Tony Stone who has never been baptized in a Fire Fight, we the audience get sent to limbo. It’s a place where we can’t get no satisfaction.
In “The Messenger” Woody Harrelson, as Captain Tony Stone, and Ben Foster, as Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery, are teamed up by the powers that be as a U.S. Army Casuality Notification service. Their job is to get to the Next Of Kin before the soon-to-be-bereaved read or hear of their loved one’s death in the media.
It’s a 24/7 job, and one the Stone/Montgomery team comes at from totally different points of view.
We all know that our buddies who came Home from Nam were tightly wrapped. Now friends coming back from Iraq are tightly wrapped the same way. Recent statistics state that one in four Iraq veterans have notably psychiatric issues.
Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery may or may not be one of those statistics. A bona fide war hero in Iraq, Montgomery has been chosen, after his physical wounds have mostly healed, to serve out his enlistment on a death notification team.
Reluctant and puzzled at his posting, he is teamed with Captain Tony Stone to deliver these most bleak and grievous messages.
Stone is a by-the-numbers career man who appears to have ice water in his veins regarding the mission at hand. Montgomery, on the other hand, has seen the results of combat. Friends with one side of their face hanging from the bone of their jaw. Buddies who were blown to bits so close by that Montgomery had to have their “flesh shrapnel” dug out of his own body.
Montgomery has an emotional attachment to the war and its death that Stone has not acquired. So when the bereaved next of kin break down upon receiving the news, Montgomery’s instinct is to comfort. “Not in the job description,” says Stone.
Montgomery gets especially attached to a dowdy yet attractive widow who receives the news of her husband’s death as she is pinning a man’s shirt to the laundry line. Stunned by the resignation and gentleness with which she receives the news of her husband’s death, Montgomery starts gently stalking her.
Let it be known that his intentions are nothing but the kindest where she is concerned. The question, of course, is whether this is a moral act or not.
In the end, we want these two hurting people to get together for healings during the next part of their lives.
Stone joined the Army because “someone dared me to.” Then, he says, “They gave me a Commission…and no one ever dared me to leave.” Montgomery joined up in hopes of finding the stable family that he never had been he was a child.
Stone and Montgomery grow closer as they share stories of each other’s lives, and as they go about the daily heart-breaking job of notifying the next of kin. In the third act, however, the script abandons the team’s growing relationship to concentrate on the situation between Montgomery and the dowdy widow.
We wonder why this is the case.
At one point, in a bar, Stone opines that every funeral of every American killed in Iraq ought to be televised. When the audience is shown part of the dowdy widow’s husband’s funeral (at which Montgomery is lurking behind a tree!) we see Stone’s point. Funerals are the ideal situation in which the far-off war comes thumping to the doorsteps of American homes. As Stone says, “It’s a war. Bullets are flying. What did they THINK was going to happen?”
There’s a scene in her kitchen where the dowdy widow and Montgomery decide not to consummate the relationship which has been building between them. This long set piece between the two of them is the best and most-moving piece of the film.
Second behind it would probably be the two-scene of Stone and Montgomery sitting drunk on a couch, watching a muted TV while Montgomery tells Stone the detailed chain of events wherein he became “a hero.”
An unsatisfying (to THIS writer) series of scenes was the one in which a character played by Steve Buscemi is notified of his son’s death. The Buscemi character takes the news horrifically, and confuses The Messenger with the message. Later? The Buscemi character comes around to apologize — and Me The Audience expected something more of this scene. Buscemi’s character just shakes hands with Montgomery and disappears into the night. It’s a puzzling use of Buscemi: wherever Buscemi appears, we (I!) expect something Buscemian to happen!!!
The films “The Hurt Locker” and “The Messenger” both make the point that once you’ve been over there (in Iraq) being over here (in America) may probably not be a comfortably viable option. It’s like being “Back in the World” after Nam…and Nothing like returning from World War II.
That alone has never, of course, been enough to mute the USA’s Military-Industrial Complex. Deaths of innocents, Americans and “others” is a small price to pay for keeping the American Death Machine humming and reaping.
That’s probably were this particular film lets us down. It never makes a real statement about the Grim Reaping Machine. It merely shows us tears and sorrows…and then heads off into a tentative romance down the road from now.
(1 hr 45. Rated R in the USA for language and some sexual content/nudity. In English, with some little Spanish. With Ben Foster as Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery, Jena Malone as Kelly, Eamonn Walker as Colonel Stuart Dorsett, Woody Harrelson as Captain Tony Stone, Yaya DaCosta as Monica Washington, Portia as Mrs. Burrell, Lisa Joyce as Emily, Steve Buscemi as Dale Martin, Peter Francis James as Dr. Grosso, Samantha Morton as Olivia Pitterson, and Paul Diomede as the motorcycle cop, among many others.)