As one war is winding down and another ramping up, more than 1.8 million American men and women have already served in Iraq or Afghanistan. January figures from the Department of Defense put the number of U.S. casualties near 45,000, and a study by the Department of Veterans Affairs released last summer has shown that one in three veterans of the two wars using VA healthcare have been diagnosed with mental health problems, post-traumatic stress disorder the most frequent diagnosis. Given these alarming statistics, Hollywood should be applauded for the number of films that it has already produced dramatizing the adjustments returning soldiers must make, even while the wars are still being waged. This, of course, is in marked contrast to the Hollywood of the Vietnam-era, which, for all of its iconoclasm, shied away from stories directly representing the war or returning vets until the U.S. had withdrawn.
This past year three noteworthy American films were released that have dealt directly with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kathryn Bigelow’s drama about a bomb-disposal squad in Iraq, The Hurt Locker, has led many top-ten lists for the year, including my own. Jim Sheridan’s Brothers focuses attention on the Afghanistan front and a soldier’s homecoming, though the film raises different issues as well: Hollywood’s unfortunate habit of diluting the dramatic power of original works from other national cinemas, in this case, the far-superior 2004 Danish film from Suzanne Bier, also titled Brothers. In comparison to this remake, critical response to The Messenger, written and directed by Oren Moverman, has been considerably more positive. Since its premiere last year at Sundance, the indie film has picked up a slew of nominations and awards for its cast and first-time director, including the Peace Film Award and the Silver Bear for best screenplay at the Berlin Film Festival. Before discussing The Messenger in more detail, though, I want to look back to some earlier films about returning veterans.
For baby boomers, no image of the Vietnam vet is more iconic than Robert de Niro’s portrayal of Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Travis’s recent military service and his honorable discharge from the Marine Corps are referred to only briefly in the opening scene, but his battle jacket with its King Kong Brigade patch and his search-and-destroy Mohawk haircut are visual reminders of that military service. His sleeplessness and increasingly aberrant behavior from undiagnosed post-traumatic stress drive the narrative forward to its bloody, film noir climax. Without question, the war had come home. Stallone’s Rambo films, beginning with First Blood in 1982, develop similar themes, but in a more conventional, increasingly formulaic manner.
Taxi Driver and First Blood were hardly the first to channel concern for war veterans into genre films. For the earliest examples we can turn back to classical Hollywood’s depictions of servicemen from the First World War. The gangster protagonist of The Roaring Twenties (1939), sympathetically played by James Cagney, turns to a career in crime because of the underemployment that awaits him after his military service to make the world safe for democracy. In the 1930s, even musicals depicted the plight of WWI veterans. Though most remembered for its opening number, “We’re in the Money,” the pre-Code Busby Berkeley backstage musical Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) climaxes with “My Forgotten Man,” a seven-minute sequence incorporating lines of men in uniform marching to battle, returning wounded, and then in tattered civilian clothes standing in bread lines––a powerful tribute to the Bonus Army march on Washington of 1932.
The massive social adjustments brought on by waves of returning veterans after the Second World War inspired large numbers of genre films, from comedies like Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) and Howard Hawks’s I Was a Male War Bride (1949) to the many postwar film noirs with returning vets as protagonists––films like The Blue Dahlia (1946), Somewhere in the Night (1946), Ride the Pink Horse (1947), and my favorite, In a Lonely Place (1950). Emotionally scarred by war, the anti-hero protagonists of these dark crime films have become cynical and brutal in the hard-boiled literary tradition of James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler. The Blue Dahlia was, in fact, scripted by Chandler, though his original concept of having a mentally-disturbed veteran be revealed as the film’s murderer was rejected by Paramount, under pressure from the Department of the Navy.
For a more uplifting drama about returning WWII veterans, none is better than The Best Years of Our Lives, though its reassurance of a brighter future does not come easily. Arguably William Wyler’s most accomplished film, Best Years tells the story of three veterans, played by Fredric March, Dana Andrews, and Harold Russell (who lost both hands during the war). Each must make difficult adjustments to civilian life: March’s character, though welcomed back by a loving family and supportive employer, drinks to deal with the sudden shift from killing to commerce. Andrews’ character finds that his service as a bombardier in Europe had not prepared him for civilian employment; his wife, attracted more to his officer’s uniform than the man, soon leaves him. And Homer Parrish (played by Russell), his hands amputated after his ship was sunk in the South Pacific, pushes away his fiancée, Wilma, so that he will be no burden for her. The film ends happily with Homer and Wilma’s marriage and the promise of better times ahead for Al and Fred. The classical Hollywood ending, though, stands in contrast to the film’s documentary-style realism created by Wyler with one of Hollywood’s most accomplished cinematographers, Gregg Toland (The Grapes of Wrath, Citizen Kane).
For even greater dramatic realism about soldiers home from war, two late additions to the films of the American New Wave are must-sees. Winner of five Academy Awards, Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) is justly celebrated for its vividly realized portrait of an ethnic, working-class community. Three Russian-American enlistees from Clairton, Pennsylvania––played by Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage––enjoy their last days before induction. In the film’s first hour, we follow them from the steel mill foundry to a Russian Orthodox wedding and reception to their last deer hunt together––personal and cultural rituals dominating the mise-en-scène of the character-driven drama. The chaos of Vietnam in the film’s second hour fails to measure up to the verisimilitude of the first act. Here Cimino conveys the effects of the war on American soldiers through a troubling, even racist metaphor. As POWs, captured in the first scene set in Vietnam, the three friends are forced to play Russian roulette as their captors gamble on their lives. That ritualistic game is twice repeated after the three escape, symbolizing Walken’s inability to heal his psychic wounds. Though Cimino defended his narrative choices by saying the film was not so much about the Vietnam War as it was about “friendship and courage . . . under stress,” the overwhelming sense of realism created by the film cannot undo audience expectation of authenticity for the war and the fall of Saigon.
For a film explicitly about healing the wounds of Vietnam, there is none better than Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978). Talent abounds in this New Hollywood film––in addition to Ashby’s fine direction, Waldo Salt’s screenplay, Haskell Wexler’s cinematography, and, of course, superb performances from Jon Voight, Bruce Dern, and Jane Fonda. The film is reminiscent of The Men (1950), Fred Zinnemann’s drama about paraplegic veterans of WWII. That earlier film, also set mainly in a VA Hospital, is most noteworthy for Marlon Brando’s screen debut, a fine performance, for which he prepared in typical method fashion, and the appearance of dozens of nonprofessionals from the Birmingham VA hospital. The rawness of Coming Home likewise comes from the freedom Ashby extended to his own method actors and the real Vietnam vets cast in minor roles. The opening scene in particular is a standout in which these vets express their feelings about the war as Voight silently listens: his character, Luke Martin, does not articulate his rage, and Voight the actor remains respectful of his real counterparts in the unscripted scene. For the film’s climax, Luke has found his voice, as he addresses a group of high school students in one of the most powerful anti-war scenes ever filmed, Voight’s dialogue improvised from contributions from the vets themselves.
The parallels between Voight’s character and Ron Kovic, the subject of Oliver Stone’s 1989 biopic, Born on the Fourth of July, is not accidental. Based loosely on Kovic, whose memoir was published in 1976, Coming Home has the advantage of greater dramatic unity, covering months rather than the twenty years of Kovic’s life in the Stone film. And while Tom Cruise’s performance as Kovic may be the best of his career, he is no match for Voight at the height of his in the 1970s. But what Stone’s film does best is to explore the cultural forces that spurred his character to enlist in the Marines even before graduating from high school––especially Kovic’s complicit mother, played by Caroline Kava, who dominates her husband and instills unquestioning patriotism and religiosity into her oldest child.
For its own contribution to this distinguished group of films, The Messenger takes a refreshing approach to the subject. Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery (Ben Foster), wounded in action in Iraq and with only months remaining in his enlistment, is assigned to an Army’s Casualty Notification team with Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson), a veteran of Desert Storm. We follow them on a series of difficult meetings with the next of kin, until Will is drawn to a young widow (Samantha Morton), whose calm and compassion cracks the protective shell in which Will has encased himself. The relationship that develops is handled as freshly and sensitively as the rest of the film––not with melodramatic clichés about two people in need. The camaraderie that develops between Will and Tony is even more important to the film’s narrative arc. Tony’s gruff insistence on protocol masks his disappointment about having never been tested in battle. As hinted from the beginning, Will has seen too much action but is unable to speak of it until the film’s climactic revelation with Tony. In demanding long takes, the two sit side-by-side as Will narrates the firefight for which he was decorated: his emotional account lays bare the survivor’s guilt that haunts him and recreates the action in our minds as powerfully as could any flashback scene.
As with the best of earlier vet films, The Messenger benefitted greatly by the contributions of actual veterans––not only the Americans who served as advisors to the film but also writer-director Moverman himself, who drew on his experiences in the Israeli Army during the 1980s. In the film’s press book, Moverman sums up The Messenger in a way that offers fitting comment to all the films I have been discussing: it “may say a thing or two about war, but ultimately it’s about the desire to live; to let life into the darkness.”