The Messenger
Directed by Oren Moverman
Runtime: 105 min.
Despite the many things wrong with Brian De Palma’s Redacted, the acting was superbly on-point. De Palma’s little-known cast got class differences right, even while the film’s rhetorical concept was slanting them into the typical Blue State condescension about working-class grunts. This bias infects the latest Iraq War movie, The Messenger, by writer-director Oren Moverman, who lacks De Palma’s instincts for actorly (human) truth. This story about two veterans (Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson) assigned MOS duty to deliver death notices to the deceased’s NOK (next-of-kin), is so bungled up with fashionable ambivalence about the Iraq War that every single behavioral detail is not just prejudicial but wrong.
Intent on dramatizing cultural malaise as a reflection of the war, Moverman cannot focus on the pain of loss (each NOK scene is unsubtle). Nor can he imagine how soldiers act out of a sense of duty or principle—both Foster and Harrelson play damaged men; their military service merely completes the job begun by life’s bad luck. Disaffected and self-destructive, they don’t believe in the dignity of their assignment. They may as well be minimum-wage burger-flippers—Moverman presents them with equivalent disdain.
Behind every moment of The Messenger, you sense a keyboard; every scene sounds “written.” It all reeks of professional seminars, playwright retreats and Sundance. Pejorative sentimentality passes for vernacular speech as when Foster becomes obsessed with a young widow (Samantha Morton) and she unloads this overwrought monologue: “When Phil re-enlisted for a third tour—like he needed to go—staying home was no longer an option. I was relieved to see him go. I missed him, but I didn’t miss the guy that just left, cuz I missed the man he was a long time ago. One morning, I opened the closet and the shirt fell out and I smelled it. It smelled awful, it smelled horrible, not to have, um, another woman or booze or cigarettes. It smelled of rage and fear. It smelled of the man that he had become over there, you know? And he didn’t treat me or his little boy very good when he was home. So in my mind it’s like he was dead already.”
For Moverman, Iraq soldiers are already dead. The Messenger is a requiem for zombies at board and overseas. Moverman isn’t skilled enough to convey complex grief like Redacted’s homecoming bar scene; he leaves his actors hanging with specious dialogue all over their faces. Full-bodied Morton has a needful, open gaze but there’s no believable sense of her character’s social reality—she’s playing a conceit. So is Foster, who is always prone to over-acting; Foster confuses making pass at Morton with showing desperation. Or is that Moverman’s confusion? Moverman can’t keep up with his actors’ misguided intensity; his camera roams over the scenes’ emotional values.
At least Kathryn Bigelow’s now-overrated Iraq War requiem, The Hurt Locker, was skillfully directed—noir tropes disguised as a war statement. Yet Bigelow’s skillful film let slip a similarly obnoxious suspicion of its characters—as in its “War is a Drug” conceit that, like The Messenger, critiques masculinity but fails to understand the depths of human commitment. It’s a sorry state when morally befuddled political tracts pass for drama.
The Messenger and The Hurt Locker both lack spiritual unity, the sense of empathy and purpose felt in Clarence Brown’s 1943 film of William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy—a film about a teenage messenger who delivers NOK telegrams during WWII. These Iraq films also lack the respect and honesty achieved in Coppola’s post-Vietnam Arlington Cemetery drama Gardens of Stone. Moverman doesn’t just disrespect America, he disrespects people (as proven by his scripts for I'm Not There and Married Life, two of the phoniest films of our time). Unlike Brown, Saroyan and Coppola, Moverman's treatment of war-era mood is uninspired.
