Stop-Loss.

"Serving, for today's audience, roughly the same cathartic purpose that movies like Coming Home and The Deer Hunter did for audiences of the 70s, Stop-Loss directly addresses the unpleasant aftershocks of our latest unpopular war - the maimed bodies and marriages; the PTSD; the loss of faith in God, Uncle Sam, and Chief George - from the perspective of the soldiers themselves," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "In the end, Stop-Loss's evening-news topicality proves both an asset and a liability - an irresolvable structural conundrum. Simply put, the film so effectively reconstitutes those Vietnam-homecoming touchstones that we can anticipate its every move well before it makes them."

"Stop-Loss is an obituary of America's leftist spirit," argues Charles Mudede in the Stranger.

Updated through 4/1.

"Well-shot with searingly bright reds, whites and blues by the great cinematographer Chris Menges, Stop-Loss has no shortage of good intentions and political urgency," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "It just needed a little more common sense."

"[E]ven if you think the US presence in Iraq is justified, Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss provides a poignant and shattering portrait of what our soldiers have to endure in combat, at home, and from an army that sends its men and women back into battle over and over again," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

"It is necessary to look past the modishness of this MTV Films production, aimed at the youth audience that resembles the film's characters," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Not simply on the anti-Bush bandwagon, Peirce's personal and professional ambivalence makes Stop-Loss the most conflicted movie yet about the Iraq War."

"This is for the most part strong stuff..., acted with precision by serious young performers and directed with populist bravado by a second time helmer who clearly wants to make a film that is deeply informed by the simple realities of war in the 21st century and the terrifying ambiguity that it leaves in its wake for those who live on having survived its horrors," writes Brandon Harris.

"That Stop-Loss wears its generally good intentions on its camo sleeve doesn't keep it from being consigned to the missed-opportunity file," writes Bill Weber in Slant.

"Predictable, pointless, and sad," sighs Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix.

Interviews with and profiles of Peirce: Paul Brownfield (Los Angeles Times), Karina Onstad (New York Times), Stephen Saito (IFC) and Clay Smith (Austin Chronicle).

Updates, 3/28: "The sober, mournful piety that has characterized a lot of the other fictional features about Iraq — documentaries are another matter — is almost entirely missing from Stop-Loss," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Not that the movie is unsentimental — far from it — but its messy, chaotic welter of feeling has a tang of authenticity.... It is an imperfect movie - marred, if anything, by its sincere affection and undisciplined compassion - about the imperfect young men who keep returning to a war the rest of us would prefer not to think about."

"It is not just that we don't want to confront the costs and consequences of that conflict when we are out for a good time at the movies," writes Richard Schickel in Time. "It is also that we don't want to acknowledge that this war has largely been fought by a victim class whose motives for joining the military are rarely noble or exemplary.... As a nation, we owe them more than they owe us - as this painfully necessary and heartfelt movie makes abundantly clear."

"This is a picture that takes a serious subject everyone in America should care about - the fact that the US government has no qualms about using up and then discarding the soldiers deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past seven years - and turns it into drama so aggressively mediocre that you're forced to guilt yourself into caring about the characters in front of you," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Watching Stop-Loss, I kept asking myself, How could I not care about Ryan Phillippe, as a trusting, dutiful soldier who's been called back to Iraq even after he's fulfilled his required term? And if you have to ask yourself how it's possible not to care, there's something wrong."

"Four thousand Americans and counting have died in Iraq, and the litany of unsuccessful films about that part of the world - The Situation, Redacted, Rendition, The Kingdom, In the Valley of Elah among others - is growing as well," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "Do not add Stop-Loss to that list. Stop-Loss is a film that does it right."

"Peirce, the director of another provocative film, the Oscar-winning Boys Don't Cry, walks a fine line between being political and being human," writes John Anderson in the Washington Post. "Human wins. And that's what might help Stop-Loss "Peirce (working from a screenplay she co-wrote with Mark Richard) explores politically incendiary subject matter with empathy, sensitivity, and a particularly sharp sense of place, in this case, a lovingly depicted Texas," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "Stop-Loss is a human story first and foremost, and Peirce and her stellar young cast ensure that the message never gets in the way of the storytelling."

"[O]nce the first act abandons its look at the compulsivity of soldier-made videos to follow through on this premise, mismatched war-flick clichés unfurl at an alarming rate, pulling the film in directions as unfocused, frustrating and meaningless as the war itself," writes Aaron Hillis for Premiere.

"[U]ltimately, Peirce and writing partner Mark Richard seem too ready to honor movie conventions at the expense of the issues," writes Robert Davis for Paste. "They've come up with a conclusion that seems designed to please all camps and to keep the film from being pigeonholed as either a flag-waver or a peacenik. It's a politician's ending, touching and gutless."

"In Stop-Loss, Peirce (whose brother served in Iraq) certainly does right by the soldiers (real and imagined) in terms of not resorting to cheap polemic from one side of the debate or the other," writes Chris Barsanti at Filmcritic.com. "But even her impressive handling of the actors, a pop approach that's glossy without being shallow, voluminous background research, and some glorious cinematography by Chris Menges can't obscure the problems of a seriously dithering screenplay."

Updates, 3/30: "While military families bear the burden of near-constant deployments and physical and emotional injuries, the rest of the country barely senses the cost of our efforts to pacify Iraq and Afghanistan," writes Reihan Salam in the Atlantic's Current. "This could be a brief for a larger, better-equipped, and better-funded military coupled with more generous benefits for veterans - an agenda embraced by many on the right and left. But that's not Peirce's message. Aimed at a broader and younger audience than earlier Iraq War polemics like Redacted and In the Valley of Elah, the movie aspires to a more affecting, powerful indictment of the war, one that paints the young Americans who choose to join the military as victims, cruelly hoodwinked by politicians with a callous disregard for their lives."

The Playlist on the soundtrack: "Curated by our music supervisor favorites Randall Poster and Jim Dunbar (the team behind I'm Not There and The Darjeeling Limited), the music culled in the film is appropriately red state-centric country by the likes of Toby Keith, Ricky Calmbach and Robert Earl Keen, good ol' boy Southern boogie (Marshall Tucker Band, and American swamp rock Creedence Clearwater Revival) and even a little hip-hop (ok, there's none in the credits, but we swear we heard a song in the film). After all, most of the film's action takes place in Texas and small town bars where brawls and southern belles are aplenty." Several links to YouTube follow.

"It first seemed a little ridiculous to me at first to team up a Kimberly Peirce and MTV Films," writes Jim Rohner, who also rounds up clips and links for Zoom In. "It makes more sense now though, seeing as the war is largely being fought by youth; the same youth MTV is geared towards. Let's admit though that the youth demographic isn't the most demanding when it comes to what they expect from the movies and this film, with enough substance to get you emotionally involved but not enough to be rivetting, shouldn't fail to disappoint them."

Updates, 3/31: "Stop-Loss is not a great movie, but it's forceful, effective, and alive, with the raw, mixed-up emotions produced by an endless war - a time when the patriotism of military families is in danger of being exploited beyond endurance," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "This movie may become the central coming-home-from-the-war story of this period, just as The Best Years of Our Lives, made in 1946, became central to the period after the Second World War.... The movie is one of the high points of psychological realism in Hollywood's studio period.... Thirty years later, in Coming Home (1978), Jane Fonda comforts Jon Voight, a paraplegic vet who, in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, is furiously banging around a military hospital in a wheelchair.... Francis Ford Coppola's forgotten Gardens of Stone, made in 1987 but set in the same period as Coming Home, is much better - a mournful elegy for the dead in Vietnam and a sober acknowledgment of the grit and the honor of military men."

"For a Feminist Studies type, Peirce has an uncanny knack for getting inside the heads of young men, for making you feel how powerfully their identities are bound up in their masculine relationships and rituals," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Stop-Loss doesn't come together, but in its ungainly way it evokes the anguish of American shit-kickers who've lost all sense of autonomy."

Updates, 4/1: Annie Nocenti talks with Peirce for Stop Smiling.

"I'm not a film critic, so I'll skip over the weak script, melodramatic music, and atrocious 'southern' accents," writes Paul Rieckhoff at the Huffington Post. "But I feel an obligation as a veteran, and especially as the head of the largest Iraq and Afghanistan veterans group in America, to comment on films that attempt to define our experiences.... [W]hat really bothers me about Stop-Loss is the stereotyping of combat veterans."

Posted by dwhudson at March 27, 2008 12:00 PM