Movie The Messenger - Delivering Bad News and Truths About War

[RamboLiberal]

At one point in “The Messenger” a soldier, just back from an overseas tour of duty, is telling a story during a welcome-home party with some friends. It starts out as a funny reminiscence of a local character he knew in Iraq, but when the anecdote takes a gruesome turn, the laughter is replaced by uncomfortable silence. Nobody gets the point of what he’s saying, or maybe nobody wants to hear it, and the happy mood of the reunion fractures.

That soldier is not one of the main characters in this movie, Oren Moverman’s sober and satisfying drama. He disappears after that one scene, having emphasized one of the film’s central insights. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have created a fissure in American society, a split that is not political but rather experiential — between the people who have been directly affected and those who have not.

This divide is perhaps most painful when it splits lovers, friends and close family members. But as “The Messenger” demonstrates with sensitive acuity, it is not necessarily a clear and simple line, and people who seem to live on the same side — servicemen on duty together, a veteran and a widow, a husband and a wife — can find themselves estranged and unable to communicate what they have in common.

As its title suggests, communication is among the film’s themes. Staff Sgt. Will Montgomery (Ben Foster), home from Iraq with a medal and a reputation for heroism, is given a new job in what the Army calls “bereavement notification.” Accompanied by an older officer, a captain named Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson), he shows up at the doors of spouses and parents — whoever is designated the official next of kin — to deliver the grimmest imaginable news. Stone and Montgomery are not trained to provide counseling or permitted to offer comfort, but instead to relate the facts and circumstances of a soldier’s death.

Sometimes they are greeted with anger, as when a father, played by Steve Buscemi, spits at them and calls them cowards. At other times, as they stand on the porches of spacious suburban houses or cramped bungalows in New Jersey towns (they are stationed at Fort Dix), they encounter denial, resignation or pure, howling anguish. Most haunting are expressions of simple gratitude, or compassion for the difficult work they are doing.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/movies/13messenger.html?8dpc