STOP-LOSS

-By Frank Lovece

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Top Gun it ain't, and that's the first surprise in this war movie from MTV Films. The second is that it’s helmed by Kimberly Peirce, who directed and co-wrote the LGBT drama Boys Don't Cry (1999). And the final surprise is that despite co-starring a former underwear model, Stop-Loss is about as youthfully glossy and light as Coming Home (1978) or The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)—two films it thematically resembles as it explores the emotional minefields of returning Iraq War vets.

After a harrowingly naturalistic combat scene set amid Tikrit guerrilla fighting, Peirce focuses on three young soldiers on leave back home in Brazos County, Texas. PFC Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is set to return to Iraq, while Sgt. Steve Shriver (aforementioned ex-model Channing Tatum) and Staff Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) have completed their enlistments. Or so King thinks, until he's pressed back into indentured servitude by the controversial U.S. policy called "stop-loss"—which essentially says that no matter what you sign up for, the military can keep you. As Title 10, Subtitle E, Part II, Chapter 1209, Section 12305 of the U.S. Code puts it, "...the President may suspend any provision of law relating to promotion, retirement or separation applicable to any member of the armed forces who [sic] the President determines is essential to the national security..." Funny how, out of reportedly 360,000 military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11, some 80,000 have been that "essential." Who knew we had so many incipient Douglas MacArthurs without whom the war effort would collapse?

Clearly, it's a crock, and the movie does a service by humanizing the effects of this inhumane policy. Yet Peirce never gets didactic about the armed services. The stoic King's sense of honor and duty rises just as righteously in his lieutenant colonel's (Timothy Olyphant) office as it did in Iraq, and, feeling betrayed, he goes AWOL. Shriver's fiancée, Michele (Abbie Cornish), volunteers to drive King through the dragnet so he can get to Washington, D.C., and plead help from his senator (Josef Sommer), whom he knows. (It's one of those towns where everybody's family has known everybody since third grade.) On the way, King and Michele detour to visit one maimed and hospitalized soldier from his platoon (Victor Rasuk), and the family of a slain comrade.

Phillippe has long transcended his golden-boy looks to become a character lead of depth and complex emotion. And Cornish—an Australian actress in her second U.S. movie—likewise goes for unglamorized reality, looking chunky in the way of what passes for small-town beauty, and little by little exposing the kind of casual toughness and strength of someone raised on the range. It's a performance of remarkable subtlety and evolution. Co-writer Mark Richard and "Roseanne"'s Laurie Metcalf, in one scene as the dead soldier's parents, are quietly heartbreaking in their unforced dignity.

The same can be said of Peirce and Richard's movie—one that makes you see the humanity and vulnerability of quick-fisted, gun-loving, jingoistic guys you might not want to know, guys who believe Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and that the half-assed Iraqi Army ever posed a threat to the United States. That Stop-Loss makes you feel for them, without pulling cheap tricks or showing them as anything but what they are, is a testament to the filmmakers' own expansive sense of humanity.