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'Stop-Loss'

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BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

March 28, 2008

Despite Jon Stewart's Oscar-night jokes about all the Iraq war movies that no one goes to see, the five-year-old war is still relatively underrepresented in commercial films. And yet, on the rare occasion one surfaces, we view it through a thick mist of déj ... vu. Is it that all wars are fundamentally the same or just all war movies?

"Stop-Loss," the turbulent new picture from "Boys Don't Cry" director Kimberly Peirce, dramatizes the impact of the Bush administration policy of sending soldiers back into the fray after they have fulfilled their military duty. While stop-loss is unique to American soldiers in Iraq, the movie it has inspired recalls the anguish of the 1946 Oscar winner, "The Best Years of Our Lives," which traced the arduous emotional journeys of three World War II veterans upon coming home to their families.

Co-written by Mark Richard with his director, "Stop-Loss" tracks the fates of three veterans whose heroes' welcome upon returning to their Texas hometown from Iraq is pitiably short-lived. Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) fulminates with remorse over his handling of an explosive skirmish in Tikrit that resulted in the deaths of several of his men, along with Iraqi civilians in the line of fire. His lifelong friend Sgt. Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum) acts out war memories through episodes related to his post-traumatic stress disorder, while their buddy Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) succumbs to alcoholic rages that imperil his marriage.

"Stop-Loss" opens with an Iraq movie cliche in the making: an overexposed home video of American soldiers in a moment of repose. This deceptively plangent prelude erupts into a tense, visceral account of the tragic Tikrit attack.

The men have barely settled into their lives in Texas when they are informed that they will shortly be returned to active duty in Iraq. Haunted by Tikrit, King lashes out at his assigning officer and goes AWOL; accompanied by Steve's fiancee, Michele (Abbie Cornish), he sets out for Washington, D.C. to make an appeal to his state senator.

Having raised the curtain on war-movie tropes, Peirce switches gears into road-movie mode. Brandon's northward odyssey is a mix of hair-trigger violence and diplomatic gestures, as he fends off thieving thugs and makes honorable detours to visit a wounded comrade in recovery and the family of a soldier who died in Tikrit.

It's an eventful trip and, reflectively, an exceedingly busy movie. War-front flashbacks, shifting locations and itinerant supporting characters crowd the screen in the attempt to keep pace with the primary characters. Peirce's flashily roaming style has the effect of diffusing some of the narrative tension, as well as shortchanging the excellent Gordon-Levitt, who assumes a fixed mask of tragic inevitability that never quits.

There is no mistaking the passions that drive the filmmaker's heart, however; "Stop-Loss" builds a cumulative power and sense of urgency that can't be denied. Much of the credit for that must go to Phillippe, who delivers a performance of fierce energy and bottled feeling that hits us where we live.

STOP-LOSS (R). Ryan Phillippe gives the most forceful performance of his career in this impassioned drama of Iraq war veterans still nursing their psychic wounds when they are ordered to return. Kimberly Peirce's film errs on the side of overwrought; given the territory, you can hardly blame her. 1:53 (graphic violence and language). At area theaters.