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.
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.