The Messenger
by Chris Knipp

Don't blame the messenger. But we do. In a key speech from Oren Moverman's The Messenger, one of the protagonists points out that people don't like being reminded how horrible war is. Or that people die in it. Delivering such news is the job of Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson): informing, in Army jargon, the "N.O.K." (next of kin) that their loved one has just perished in Iraq. The movie's job in turn, I suppose, is to tell us how many lives war, or the latest one, wrecks. But this is, alas, likely to be another Iraq movie nobody will want to watch. The Messenger is so downbeat and its action is stuck in so deep a rut that it never quite sings or emerges from its narrow context. Nonetheless the details are interesting, the feel is authentic, and the acting is excellent.

As The Messenger begins, the captain is joined by Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery (Ben Foster), a young man who has just recovered, physically anyway, from an explosive encounter in Baghdad that got a lot of his squad killed and gained him a medal. He's come back to find that his girlfriend (Jena Malone) is marrying somebody else. When he tries to relate to people, he tends to implode. Now he's assigned to spend his last three months of active duty with the captain, a shakily recovering alcoholic, who explains the rules and procedures of the difficult job of being (in the government euphemism) a Casualty Notification Officer, with grim dictatorial bravado (Harrelson handling his "wild man" role with panache, restraint, and humor). You play it strictly by the book. You don't talk to anybody but the N.O.K. You do not wait around for the N.O.K. You get in, you say your piece, and you get out.

This is about the worst job you could imagine (or the Army could offer you), and, as shown here, downright dangerous. The N.O.K., especially if male, may not kill you, but they could very well physically attack you, and at the very least will launch into hysterics, or verbal abuse, or collapse and need immediate medical attention. Partly this movie is simply the study of a process most people don't know about, though again, they may not really want to know.

The plot has to escape its confining how-to format. It does so, not altogether successfully, by having Will, who has not really gotten with the program, decide early on to violate protocol and become involved with the bereaved Olivia (Samantha Morton), who has a sad sweetness about her. The encounters between Olivia and Will are painful and awkward, but touching. Neither of them is ready for a relationship. Olivia is passive, and kindly. When the captain originally tells her of her husband's death, she shakes both soldiers' hands and says "I know this can't be easy for, you," -- "A first!" the hardened Tony later exclaims. Will desperately needs to be of help or maybe just to rest his head on Olivia's breast.

These people have nowhere to go, though Olivia decides to head south. Painfully, all three reach out a little. Tony goes off the wagon ("I have to call my sponsor," he says, realistically, after a binge), but in doing so, and then going fishing and getting beaten up together, the two men bond.

The weakness of the thoughtful, well-informed screenplay by Alessandro Camon and Moverman himself (who collaborated with Todd Haynes on the script of I'm Not There) is that the romance is a non-starter, too much of a distraction from the bonding between Tony and Will. The men's raucous intrusion on Will's ex's wedding party is a good set piece, but both men could use more of a back story. Moverman is said to have seen action in the Israeli army, and the movie is at its best in capturing the feel of military life -- the edge of craziness after long service, and the desperate refuge in routine, with an equally desperate need to escape from it. For all its weaknesses, this is a reasonably promising directorial debut for Moverman, though, as I am not the first to say, it is far from as great an Iraq war movie as Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker.

©2008 Chris Knipp
CineScene