Home of the Brave
Directed by Irwin Winkler
Home of the Brave, the first Hollywood drama about the current Iraq War, stars Samuel L. Jackson and the rapper 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson) as two black soldiers who come home emotionally and physically wounded. This film’s title and premise reiterates a famous 1949 World War II film directed by Mark Robson and produced by Stanley Kramer, which climaxed with a paralyzed black veteran (James Edwards) being shocked into mobility when his white rehabilitation doctor taunts him with a racial slur. Director Irwin Winkler can’t use that device with Jackson and 50 Cent (they’ve already patented the slur for fun, profit and ridicule). But Winkler dares to revive Kramer and Robson’s socially-conscious ethic. In the process, Winkler’s Home of the Brave presents both Jacksons in roles that redefine their humanity and all our citizenship.
Winkler has gone against the political vogue by making an Iraq War drama that offers little of the typical left-leaning, liberal dissent. This film looks at the war for its impact on the lives of Americans at home, coming close to the ambivalence found in some country music and felt outside the New York/Los Angeles media centers. Set in Spokane, Wash., which is home to four returning soldiers (Jackson, 50 Cent, Jessica Biel, Brian Presley) and one dead casualty, Home of the Brave traces the humanity inside the war’s contentious politics. It clears the air.
After WWII, many filmmakers confronted the country’s changed psychic landscape. The result was a series of films about social problems that American moviemakers, personally changed by the war, addressed with new candor. It’s become fashionable today to scoff at the sincerity of such filmmakers—Kramer, Robson, Louis de Rochemont, Elia Kazan, Joseph L. Manckiewicz—as if they had shortchanged their artistry for sentiment. Movies like Home of the Brave, Bright Victory, Lost Boundaries, Gentlemen’s Agreement, Pinky and No Way Out wore their convictions proudly. Fact is, those particular movies dealt with the post-war unease experienced by non-white or non-middle class Americans—a more disturbing proposition than a fine, “official” post-war film like The Best Years of Our Lives, which came to be used emblematically, almost as a self-congratulatory palliative.
But the original Home of the Brave belonged to that “unofficial” category known as either Problem or Protest Films, which doesn’t pretend things would easily be made right after the trauma of war. That explains the brilliant, politicized use of the ethnic epithet which interjected a social problem and simultaneously evoked a rising, personal protest. Such drama required courage and trust in society’s goodwill, which that has disappeared in Hollywood movies, especially in the miasma following 9/11 and President Bush’s reelection.
Winkler avoids frivolous war protesting in a scene involving a high school student wearing a BUCK FUSH T-shirt. The kid’s mother is embarrassed and the kid’s father, an Iraq War vet, schools his son on the issues, pointing out that the popular sentiment is both facile and disrespectful of those who serve. The film’s melancholy tone is not about the war but about the country. Winkler shows an uncanny sense for how small-town people interact. These veterans’ tales are sobering; Winkler’s not drunk on sanctimony or singing to the Dixie Chicks choir.
It might have served Winkler better to have cast a better actor in the lead role of war medic Will Marsh; nothing Samuel L. Jackson says is ever quite believable without his usual four-letter expletives. The sensitivity and gravity of Bush-era anxiety deserves a more finely-tuned and vulnerable actor than Jackson bluffing his way through a less excitable, reflective recognition. It’s almost tragic that the film industry has encouraged Jackson to harden and overscale his emotions. His association with garbage, like the paranoid military drama Basic, unfortunately taints his involvement with this film’s meaningful exposition of the military’s serious institutional crisis: how war damages the lives of the men and women who fight it.
Luckily, Home of the Brave’s other characters are more effectively cast. One scene in particular will rank as the most revealing expression of post-war irony. Biel and Presley meet again in a movie mall, trade the names of their drugs and comment on the irrelevance of the fare that is commonly used to anesthetize the American public.
