The Messenger (2009)

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Absolutely amazing

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

This may be the toughest non-combat task in any army - announcing the families that their dearest ones, son or daughter, husband or wife fell on the line of duty in war. It needs to be done fast, as relatives should learn about the tragedy before the news show in the media, it needs to be done with dignity and sensitivity for the grief of the family, and rules, of course, rules need to be respected. However what rules are worth in such personal and painful moments? And how can the messengers, even if or especially because they are themselves people who have seen combat and faced death, their own and the one of their comrades, cope with this task? These are the key questions asked by The Messenger, a film with excellent premises which has as heroes a team of two of the uniformed soldiers the US army deploys home to pass to families the messages of death.It's quite interesting that this American film about the consequences of the American wars for the people who fight and for the families left home was written by an Israeli and an Italian (Alessandro Camon) and directed by the Israeli - Oren Moverman. Or maybe it is not, at least on what Moverman is concerned. This story could have happened in Israel as well, where quite a number of families have to deal with the loss of their closer family or friends in wars or terror attacks, and where Memorial Day is one very special moment, felt and lived together by the whole nation. Quite amazingly the Israeli cinema has dealt very little until now with this subject, and Moverman, who lives in the US made the film there. The result is The Messenger - a very American and a very universal film at once, one of the most interesting made until now about and against the war in Iraq.At no moment I had the feeling that this is the first long feature film directed by Moverman. As director he masters well the camera moves, alternating traditional and fluent scenes with hand-held camera giving the feeling of reality and passing to viewers the intense dramatic effects when the announcements are being made to the families. The team of actors does a fine job as well, with Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson up to the task of playing the two soldiers with their lives transformed forever by the war even if they survive it, and with Samantha Morton whose work I love every time I see her giving a strong and perfectly restrained performance as the fresh widow who tries to keep hope and make the life go on despite the terrible loss. The big problem of the film is that despite the excellent premises the story does not have enough dramatic tension, so the excellent first half creates expectations that are not well fulfilled in the second half. The story of the fight near the lake, or the incident at the wedding do not fit well and do not add too much to the evolution of the characters. Moreover, the discussions between the two members of the team become suddenly too verbose for people who up to then seemed to be much more used to action than words, and who looked like understanding situations and communicating just by gestures or expression of eyes. The feeling I was left at the end was that The Messenger has a story of big potential, but not fully realized.

After paying his dues with thankless supporting roles, Ben Foster finally gets to display his leading man chops. What fine chops they are too. Foster oozes confidence on the screen. His natural talent shines through. Here he plays a man given of the duty of informing soldier's next of kin of their demise. Teamed with Woody Harrelson, the pair visit a number of homes. Each one is like some new episode of a fascinating series of shorts. Each family deals with the grief in a different way. It's a great insight into that brief 10 second moment in life where everything changes. It's also hard to capture that gut-punching realization, something this film does very well. Towards the end the film wonders off, becoming a buddy road movie in the vain of Sideways. I felt the wedding scene was unnecessary, but as a whole this should be one of the strong contenders come award season.

How can a man overcome despair and reconstruct himself without love? Answer: he can't. This is the story of a rebirth. He returns from Iraq with a torn body and in love of a woman he knows since his childhood. They break up as she does not see a future for him. This is perhaps the most beautiful scene of the movie. Their lovemaking at the beginning is one of the most beautiful scenes of lovemaking I have ever seen. And yet, it carries a kind of finality with the terrible scene of that evening dinner when they stare at each other, fully knowing it is over. It is a long dark road for him, as his new duty is to inform families their sons and daughters have died in the line of duty. His commanding officer is strictly forbidding any kind of relation or compassion with the NOK (Next of Kin). And in pitch darkness he finds light with a young widow. Their story is as fragile as a desert flower after the rain. A blossom with a future? Yes, because the seed is buried deep, and even separated by distance, their hearts know that they are meant for each other. A beautiful love story it is. It is not about war, it is about loneliness and despair. And there are angels. No one is left alone. Love saves.

Two-thirds into The Messenger, Woody Harrelson's grizzled Desert Storm veteran ironically puts his finger on part of the reason why Hollywood's Iraq war dramas have been such flops. As he tells Ben Foster's young, traumatised war hero, "In Vietnam, those guys got laid six ways from Sunday". Bosnia? "Best brothels in the world." But Iraq? "All that religious bulls**t – and nobody getting laid. That's half the reason everybody's so angry!" Crudely put, Iraq isn't sexy. Iraq is too recent, too raw, too alien and frankly too illegal for most cinema-goers to regard as entertainment. Even the prospect of Jason Bourne in Baghdad couldn't save Green Zone from scooping less than a handful of sand at the box office. And if The Hurt Locker proved the bankable exception, all it really proves is that people prefer their action movies as apolitical as possible. Actually, the best films being made right now about the wars in the middle-east are documentaries – which is also problematic, as American audiences usually look forward to those about as much as getting their feet blown off by an IED. As a US army private remarked in 2007, Iraq "is a reality show everybody's bored of." What The Messenger does is to bring the war back home again in a very literal and jolting way. Foster and Harrelson play emissaries for the Angel of Death. As a Casualty Notification team it is their hideous assignation to ring doorbells and unmake somebody's day. These soldiers may be deactivated from combat, but together they're as lethal as a pair of hollow points – one weathered and scratched, the other, freshly popped out of the mould, repeatedly strolling into zones packed with emotional time-bombs... and heavily pregnant girlfriends. It's never anything other than absolutely horrible. And strangely, calls to mind Alan Clarke's short film Elephant – a succession of near-wordless sectarian executions in Northern Ireland. With their long, static takes, both pictures have a voyeuristic quality, but where Elephant is coolly dispassionate, The Messenger means to shake you like a rag doll, and does so.As a character study and dark sort of buddy movie, it works very well. There's something of the young Sean Penn about the excellent Foster, straining to reach out to the world, while the testosterone-squirting Harrelson, whose bald dome and beady eye makes him look even more like a walking erection, personifies the confluence between lust and war with every utterance: "I'd like to strap her on and wear her like a government-issue gas mask" he notes of a passing barmaid.If there's a certain over-familiarity about its scenes of men hurting themselves in small rooms to speed metal soundtracks, or limping dazedly around supermarket aisles longer and wider than Death Valley, well, perhaps that's unavoidable: this is now cinema's official depiction of PTSD. The film does lose focus after Foster ignores procedure ("Don't touch the N.O.Ks!") and falls for Samantha Morton's army widow – a beautifully understated performance, despite having to parrot such clunky Oscar-bait as "His shirt smelled of rage and fear. It smelled of the man he had become, over there. You know?" In his 1959 novel The Tin Drum, Günter Grass conjures up a swanky post-war nightspot called The Onion Cellar, where emotionally constipated Germans pay through the nose to perch on crates and ritually slice onions until they're swimming in crocodile tears. Back then, Grass was satirising Germany's inability to grieve following its numbing defeat. Today, Hollywood is harvesting onions as fast as it can – yet the more onions it lobs at audiences, the more audiences duck. Perhaps years from now, a drama will be made that perfectly articulates the Allied experience of Iraq, as The Deer Hunter or Apocalypse Now did with Vietnam. The Messenger isn't that film, but it's among the better ones.