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Decorated Iraq war hero Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) returns to his Texas hometown and tries to give moral support to wartime buddy Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum) in writer-director Kimberly Peirce’s film, “Stop-Loss,” about the so-called “backdoor draft” used by the military in the Iraq war.

By NELL MINOW

A young soldier home from Iraq is forced to rethink his ideas about heroism and patriotism when he is “stop-lossed”: informed that instead of leaving the Army he has been involuntarily assigned to another tour of duty.

In writer-director Kimberly Peirce’s uneven film, Brandon (Ryan Phillippe) and Steve (Channing Tatum), his best friend since high school, are greeted with a hero’s welcome home right out of a Norman Rockwell painting, with a parade and a warm handshake from their U.S. senator, who says his door will always be open to real-life American heroes. They speak proudly about “killing ‘em in Iraq so we won’t have to kill ‘em in Texas.” But when Brandon finds out that the government has the right to send him back, he goes AWOL and leaves for Washington, D.C., with Steve’s estranged fiancee (Abbie Cornish), hoping the senator will find a way for him to stay home.

The real-life Army euphemism “stop-loss,” sometimes referred to as a “backdoor draft” for the all-volunteer Army, takes on multiple meanings as the film progresses. Brandon’s efforts to stay home are his own stop-loss program. When he first comes home, he seems to be the most stable and responsible of the returning soldiers. But he crumbles quickly when he gets his return orders. For him, leaving the Army is the only way to stop further loss of his ability to resume a normal life. His efforts to resist only create conflicts with the people closest to him.

The film opens with a terrifying scene in Iraq as Brandon and his men are inspecting cars at a checkpoint, making split-second decisions as they try to be courteous and reassuring but alert to any possible threat. Suddenly there is an attack that turns into an ambush. Peirce stages it like a shoot-out from a classic Western as the American soldiers have to defend themselves in the middle of a residential street, trying to shoot around anyone who is not attacking them and sustaining terrible losses and injuries. We return to that scene again late in the film to see another layer of conflict as Brandon speaks of his deepest pain, his inability to protect his men.

Brandon has two important encounters on his journey to Washington. He pays his respects to the family of one of his men who was killed, and visits another who was badly injured and is still hospitalized (Victor Rasuk, who makes a vivid impression in his brief time on screen). Even though this soldier, an immigrant, has lost an arm and a leg, his spirits are good and he wants to return to Iraq. “If I get killed, my family would get green cards!” he says cheerfully.

In her first film, “Boys Don’t Cry,” Peirce showed a sensitive understanding of the struggles of heartland Americans reconciling their experiences with American ideals of hope and strength. She returns to those themes here, and the movie’s best moments show the contrast between the strength of the soldiers’ bond with one another and their feeling of dislocation from who they were and who they want to be. They feel no need to talk about the former, but cannot find the words to help them understand the latter. So they drink to feel numb and mistreat their loved ones and shoot at things to feel alive.

No matter how respectfully made and deeply felt, no feature film about the experience of American soldiers in the era of the Iraq war can approach the visceral power of the films made by and with the troops themselves. No studio film with actors can have the impact of any of hundreds of clips uploaded to YouTube or the superb documentaries that let the soldiers tell their own stories like “Gunner Palace,” “My War My Story” and “The War Tapes.”

Despite the sincerity of its aspirations, “Stop-Loss” is hampered by awkward construction, its characters’ inarticulate attempts to describe and discuss what is going on, and the handsome Hollywood gloss that cannot come close to the power of real-life soldiers telling their own stories.
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Nell Minow is the film critic for the Web site beliefnet.com.