THE MESSENGER

The Messenger (2009)

Grade: B+

Starring: Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson, Samantha Morton, Jena Malone and Steve Buscemi

Premise: A decorated young soldier is reassigned to the U.S. Army’s Casualty Notification Service for his final months of duty, and soon finds himself attracted to a widow he encounters in the line of service.

Rated R for strong language, intense, disturbing emotional content, and some sexuality/nudity

With the days of John Wayne heroics long past, the movie industry has learned to stop conveying war as something exciting or desirable. Now that makeup and special effects can convincingly portray sizable explosions and graphic injuries, and movie ratings’ committees allow for more realistic depictions of battle, war has stopped being portrayed as “fun”. But despite all the battered bodies, stunning explosions, fierce emotion and what-are-we-doing-to-each-other lamentation war movies have conjured up in the past few decades, movies about war haven’t always left us shaken, haven’t always reminded us Americans, for one, that we’ve been engaged in a very real, very costly war for over a decade now.

As a guy who always loves a good battle scene, there aren’t many war movies that have really left me shaken, or re-routed my way of thinking about war and its ramifications. In the past few years, The Hurt Locker, In the Valley of Elah and Jarhead all did that, mostly because they all uncovered something new about the wartime life/experience in my mind. They were more about people and their emotions than machine-gun heroics on the field of battle.

After I watched it last night, Oren Moverman’s The Messenger immediately joined that club. Chronicling the daily lives of a pair of U.S. Army soldiers in the Casualty Notification Service—i.e. the men who show up on people’s doorsteps in their dress uniforms and begin each new phase of their job with the phrase, “The Secretary of the Army regrets…”—this 2009 film is a quiet but blistering drama that almost dares you to believe it’s real, that the things it portrays really happen. Beautifully acted and brilliantly filmed, The Messenger is a riveting and shattering reminder of what a war can do to the lives of people who are thousands of miles from the bullets.

Growing up in a family guarded and guided by the United States Marine Corps, I experienced many of the familiar tropes of military life, but I luckily never experienced the sort of vivid, grueling encounter The Messenger deals with. My dad did, though. As a squadron Commanding Officer late in his career, he had to don his best uniform and visit houses in the wake of a catastrophic miss-hap that involved two helicopters on training runs colliding in mid-air and then plunging into the ocean off the African coast. I didn’t accompany him on his visits, of course (though I believe my mom did), but I know he first had to visit the houses of those several Marines who were aboard the helicopters to tell the families the men were missing, and, within a few days, to tell them they were confirmed dead. I would never ask him to re-visit these experiences for my sake, but I saw then-and I still see, now-the impact they left on him. Obviously, that is one job nobody wants to have.

In The Messenger, that is the precise task newly bequeathed to decorated combat veteran Will Montgomery, a US Army Sergeant played in a brilliant performance by Ben Foster. Emotionally stunted and physically scarred (he has a deep, anchor-shaped indentation beneath his left eye that requires daily medicated drops, and walks with a slight limp), Will has come home to a barren life: his parents are absent and his pre-wartime girlfriend (Jena Malone) is engaged to another man. He doesn’t care a whit for his “hero” label and thinks he may give it all up when his enlistment ends in a few months. But, until then, he’s assigned to the Casualty Notification Service, the “sacred” corps that informs American citizens that someone they love has died.

Will, with his clear, quiet voice and hard stare, is subsequently paired up with Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson, characteristically witty and earthy), a man with no significant combat experience but lots of time logged in Casualty Notification. Being thus experienced, Stone quickly lays out the basics of the Casualty Notification job for Will: only speak to the specified primary Next of Kin, always use the full name, use no euphemisms for death (it won’t help), don’t hug or otherwise touch the informed individuals, and, essentially, get in and get out. There’s even a script Will has to learn, about how the Secretary of the Army expresses his deepest sympathies, how a Casualty Assistance Officer will contact the informed individuals within a few hours to begin laying out the details of memorial services and funerals, and how they ought to call a friend, neighbor, or relative to help them during this difficult time.

Obviously, no matter how well-rehearsed, the episodes never go as planned, and, in a half-dozen terrifying and grueling sequences, Will and Stone visit the houses of deceased soldiers and break the news. In one house, the mother and girlfriend of the dead soldier break into shrieks and howls of hysteria, but not before the mother deals Captain Stone a hard slap in the face. In another, a man sobs over his daughter’s death while her son plays with toys in the background. At another, the father (Steve Buscemi) of a fallen soldier explodes into a rage, hitting Will and calling him an idiot and a coward, demanding to know why he isn’t “over there dying”. But there’s one where the quiet widow (Samantha Morton) of a fallen soldier almost seems to have expected the news, thanks Will and Stone for telling her, and even shakes their hands and acknowledges how hard it must be for them. It’s the latter that Will can’t get out of his mind, and, sensing some of the same loneliness and loss he himself feels, he goes back to visit the woman. He helps fix her car, he joins her and her son for pizza. Will is just so lonely, and so haunted, that this calm, resigned, plain-speaking woman is soothing to him.

Other than detailing Will and Olivia’s (Morton’s character) quasi-relationship, The Messenger doesn’t particularly have a forward-moving plot. Will and Stone get to know each other, the snarky and disaffected Stone senses real value and courage in Will while Will decides his thrice-divorced, semi-recovering alcoholic partner/mentor isn’t such an uncaring jackass. Mostly, it’s about brokenness, the brokenness people feel as a result of any catastrophe, but especially an ongoing war that, while it sometimes demands your immediate attention, mostly demands that you go on with life as much as you can, no matter what’s happening around you. Boy, can we, in this day and age, identify with that.

The acting is utterly superb. Harrelson snagged an Academy Award nomination in the Supporting Actor category in 2009 for the role, and while he definitely deserves it, I can’t believe Foster and Morton didn’t make it into the Lead Actor and Supporting Actress categories. Foster, as previously noted, is amazing. The subtle but unmistakable look in Will’s eyes when another soldier praises him as a hero is one snapshot in a superbly powerful performance that is more about facial expressions than fancy dialogue. That said, his long, quiet, regretful monologue about the circumstances that got him his injuries and his medals that occurs late in the proceedings is an absolute marvel. Will is absolutely believable as a real person, one’s whose sometimes repulsive and sometimes lovable, but always sympathetic. Harrelson, getting the gaudier and funnier performance, is similarly good, dynamite in his early scenes of teaching Will the ropes and devastatingly convincing as a trained, but no less nervous or vulnerable, bearer of the bad news (one late scene, in which Capt. Stone breaks down in the wake of Will’s disturbing recount of his experience and guilt over his breaking his three years’ sobriety, almost makes you want to hide your eyes, it’s so raw). Morton, as the final leg of the main trio, gives another powerful performance—one particular scene, alone, made her worthy of an Oscar nomination.

The scene takes place in Olivia’s kitchen. Her son is at school, and she and Will have been talking, even running errands together. He’s fixed her car, they’ve talked, they’ve both confided in each other a little bit. And they stand in her kitchen, nearly embracing, briefly waltzing, drawing very close to gently kissing before Olivia pulls back, ashamed and grief-stricken at thoughts of her dead husband. She comes back to Will, then draws away again. Then she comes back in. Will, for his part, looks willing, and you can tell he’s starving for real human contact, but he doesn’t force her or push her—he knows she’s fragile and won’t make her do something she’ll regret. He stays very close to her, though, lightly touching her, sometimes resting his forehead against hers, while she struggles with some clear physical attraction (or else, a need for passionate intimacy with another person), before breaking into an impulsive and emotional monologue about how she once loved her now-dead husband, came to fear and even hate him as their marriage soured, but, after his death, has come to love and value him again. In a lesser movie, Will and Olivia would have developed a more conventional romance—in this scene, most movies would have reverted to these two lonely, broken people grappling and pulling their clothes off, seeking solace and companionship in passion physical interaction (think Monster’s Ball’s famous “make me feel good” scene between Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton). That does not happen, and the movie’s the better for it. The scene—like many in this film—is so riveting, so real, so astonishingly believable that, as a viewer, you almost feel like an intruder, like it’s indecent to have a camera there.

The other important actors in the film are, of course, the Next of Kin (who Captain Stone refers to as NOKs) in this movie’s idea of set-pieces, the Casualty Notifications. Other than Steven Buscemi, none of them are name actors, and they rarely get long screenshots or even actual facial shots, but their different reactions (grief, anger, gut-wrenching sadness, even sudden physical sickness) are mesmerizing and haunting. They are what makes this movie so memorable.

Many movies have featured individuals coming to the door to inform the Next of Kin of the loss of their loved ones (be it the telegraph-bearing mailmen in Mel Gibson’s We Were Soldiers, or the decked out high-ranking officers in countless police and firefighter movies), but none has focused as exclusively on them as The Messenger, and, as a result, few movies can register quite as harrowing and gut-wrenching. You know it’s something people do, and, yet knowing it’s something certain people do on a daily basis-as their job-and yet can never possibly “get better at”, is a haunting concept. It dares to make the viewer wonder what it would be like if there were on either end of a Casualty Notification—the person receiving the worst news you can hear, or the person somehow giving it. Beautifully acted, fearlessly filmed and written, and heartbreakingly true, The Messenger joins the hallowed ranks of war movies that never show a single skirmish and don’t take place on a battlefield, but are singularly disturbing reminders of its cost.

The Messenger (2009)

Directed by Oren Moverman

Written by Alessandro Camon and Oren Moverman

Rated R

Length: 112 minutes