BECAUSE LIFE, especially in wartime, can be understatedly
described as “messy,” it’s perhaps feasible to excuse The
Messenger‘s disarray. The film’s initial purpose is to explore the
experience of servicemen tasked with notifying the next of kin when a
soldier is killed. It’s a rich and largely overlooked perspective, and
it could, and should, have been the dedicated focus of the entire
picture. Likewise, a romance between a widow and the soldier bearing
news of her husband’s death is also surely worthy of its own work, and
an emotional soldier-to-soldier booze-fueled bender of a bro-down is
much more than what some great films have been built on. But to cram
all three into one film so laden with the ability to do just one really
well, is to create a sense of unfinished business.
The audience’s introduction to this ramblingly lifelike tale comes
via Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery (Ben Foster), a tightly wound
soldier finishing up a tour in Iraq that left him injured, with the
added insult of his girlfriend having decided to marry someone else.
Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson) is the recovering alcoholic
assigned to teach Montgomery the emotionless comportment of a casualty
notification officer. Harrelson’s plausible hardness—and the
kaleidoscopic and unpredictable display of grief responses that
Montgomery and Stone’s visits elicit—are terrifically nerve
wracking, but just as you’re hooked, the movie screeches to a halt.
Enter Olivia (Samantha Morton), the aforementioned widow who serves
as a colorless springboard for Montgomery’s reconnection to his own
empathic powers. But the film’s now-contemplative speed is again
disrupted in its final chapter, with a sudden, unexpectedly passionate,
and totally out of character romp of shit-faced camaraderie between
Montgomery and Stone, thus completing the trinity of muddled
anti-climaxes.
Despite The Messenger‘s sheer disorganization of plot,
Foster’s performance is engrossing, and under-explored emotional
poignancies scatter across its three arcs. It peels back the layers of
stories begging to be recognized for their worthiness, and there’s much
to be gleaned from them—so much, in fact, that it overburdens the
one film they share.