"The Messenger" (2009)

Coming Home Or With Or Without Them...

"The Messenger" (2009) Review

 

The messenger deals with a difficult topic and is worthy of accolades just for attempting to deal with the complexity of returning home from the front. The viewer should remember that the film is about people meeting, whether through forming long lasting relationships or walking in and out of one another's lives.

The film begins with Staff Sargent Will Montgomery (Ben Foster), an army mechanic in Iraq who after heroically saving men in his company and being injured in a firefight returns to America. His life appears incomplete as the woman he loves is engaged to another man and he lives, as his comrade, Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson) describes it having "already seen the shit." Montgomery is asked to serve the remainder of his term as a messenger delivering news of casualties to loved ones back home.

Though the film deals with how Montgomery tries to reconstitute his life, it also deals with the amiable relationship between Montgomery and Stone, Montgomery's superior officer and, towards the end of the movie, best friend. In addition to these two small facets of Montgomery's life, the film also deals with the topic of returning home from a war and how truly difficult it is to reorient ones life back to the norms of civilian life.

Yet, these are far reaching topics which the film strives to ask the viewer, yet which ultimately do not need to be asked. If anything, this film overreaches, trying to ask too much, much more than any film can, yet this does not hinder the film's strongest suits; the performances and script.

Foster and Harrelson both deliver outstanding performances as they both portray the epitome of soldiers, facetious and warm men trying to muddle through life, and edifying figures on the soldiers experience. Their performances are, in short, perfect. Aiding the two actors is superb scriptwriting by Alessandro Camon an Oren Moverman, who cowrote this film yet worked together on many other pictures such as "American Psycho", "Thank You For Smoking" and "I’m not there." Their writing brings their characters to the forefront through realistic (not blatantly declaring their intentions like in many Liam Neeson movies) and engaging dialogue.

This film is not an easy watch though as it contains many quiet and troubling moments where families are told of the death of their loved ones. Such moments make this film yet are also the films greatest challenge as they seems to be tacked on a bit and could be done without, yet are invaluable to the films emotional core as they compel most of the emotional reactions from Harrelson and Foster.

In short, the film is complex, subtle, and deep as its many parts culminate in a beautiful living picture that offers and ending similar to that of "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946); the hope of a bright future and yet an unfinished dialogue. As the film draws to its end, the question of what will happen to these broken people come to a head, and the audience is left to gaze at the screen, absorb the characters, and then quietly wonder. Do the answers exist? In the end, you decide.

Stars: 9/10