January 6, 2010: The Messenger
All I knew about The Messenger was that Woody Harrelson was in it, and there was awards buzz about his performance. At this time of the year, that’s all I need.
I have enjoyed watching Harrelson since his early days on Cheers in the mid-1980s, and I respected his emphatic jump into gritty fare such as White Men Can’t Jump (1992) and Natural Born Killers (1994) in the early 1990s, to erase forever the image of Cheers’ innocent and childlike Woody Boyd, and introduce us to another side of an intense actor who really can immerse himself in offbeat and borderline crazy characters and bring it off believably. Witness the crowning achievement in this transformation as he portrayed the sleazy and progressively disabled porn king Larry Flynt in The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996). In The Messenger, there are flashes of this wild child, contained within a respected Army officer who has the unenviable task of informing next-of-kin of the loss of their loved ones in combat.
This film was gripping right from the start, and didn’t let up until about 40 minutes in, when it backed off a bit to let the viewer breathe. Ben Foster plays an injured and decorated soldier returning from Afghanistan who is assigned to spend the remaining few months of his enlistment going along with Harrelson on his difficult missions to the homes of normal American families. Foster strains against Harrelson’s rigid rules of engagment with these civilians, learning along the way that many of those rules are there for a very good reason, but some are there because Harrelson can’t bring himself to humanize what is of course an unquestionably human situation.
But a complete movie couldn’t have arisen from just repeated high-tension visits to grieving families, so once this phase of the film ends, we move on to Foster’s preoccupation with one of the young new widows he has met in the course of his work, as well as his sort-of friendship with Harrelson, who seems to be looking for a friend but not making it easy to get close.
Foster is well suited to this role, capturing the humanity and vulnerability we know exists in most of these young soldiers, but also exhibiting the dogged determination of a regular guy which is what really makes soldiers into heroes. He’s been in lots of stuff over the years (insert Judd Apatow reference here – he had a very minor supporting role in Freaks and Geeks), but most indelible for me was his portrayal of an evil man – there’s really no other description – a couple of years ago in 3:10 to Yuma. That role and this are like night and day, and we’ll probably continue to see Foster’s profile rise as a result of his versatility.
Samantha Morton, as the grieving widow of interest, brings a lot to this film with her quiet performance, as she tries to figure out what she wants, and what is right, and where those two intersect. I’ve always liked her acting, and didn’t know that she had suffered a stroke a few years ago and struggled to properly regain her speech skills!
So, where does The Messenger fit into the spectrum of American war movies? Well, it falls solidly into the aesthetic and attitude of modern US war movies, from the first Gulf war to the present, particularly as compared with the older films about the Vietnam war, which were appropriately less earnest and more viscerally angry. These war movies are often not financially successful, which also applies here, and the same applies to the much lauded The Hurt Locker which was released earlier in 2009. Some are contrite – Flags of our Fathers (2006) comes to mind, and The Messenger easily avoids that. Some really are quite affecting, and The Messenger manages that in its way, probably better than In the Valley of Elah (2007), which had its strong points but didn’t ultimately hold together. You may or may not like Harrelson’s character, and you may or may not like the choices Foster makes, but you have to admit they both live tough lives and the right path is not obvious. The Messenger doesn’t take the easy way out at the very end, which is nice to see, even though the story arc remains fairly predictable for the second half of the film. It’s definitely worthwhile for the performances, if you can handle the emotional journey and don’t mind the change of gears halfway through the film.
A gripping tale of broken soldiers.
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