The Messenger
Melbourne International Film Festival, 26/07/2010
Status: Behind by 19 films
There are plenty of films out there saying eloquent and brutal things about the war in Iraq and its impact on the mental health of soldiers (Stop-Loss and The Hurt Locker, say). This is not new grist for the cinematic mill. I thought that The Messenger would be checking out a different angle to the story by focusing on Montgomery (BEN FOREST, 3.10 to Yuma, X-Men 3: The Last Stand) and Stone (WOODY HARRELSON), the two guys who have to notify the families when a soldier in killed in Iraq. Turned out, though, it had almost exactly the same things to say as other films on the subject, only not quite so well.
Montgomery has returned from Iraq, seriously wounded in a battle that killed some men in his unit. To see out his last three months in uniform, he teaches new recruit mechanics and does the messenger job for the Casualty Notification Unit. Stone turns out to be a meathead with delusions of badass whose rules about serving the terrible news include not touching the newly bereft nor straying from the cold-hearted script.
At this point, the film had lost me twice - and would lose me several more times as it progressed - if the notification job is really as hard and as important as the military brass say it is (and this is certainly how they depict it again and again in the film), then why the pants would they send an untrained, unexperienced young guy with return trauma and PTSD to do it?
The plot meanders around as Montgomery and Stone partake of some fairly conventional self-destruction. The film is saved from being completely uninteresting by a couple of dynamite scenes. One is a mostly-dialogue free single shot of Montgomery almost crossing the line with a new widow (SAMANTHA MORTON, Morvern Callar, In America) he has taken a fancy to. But one great scene does not a great movie make, and the rest is nothing I haven’t seen done better before.
