Soldier Boys Don't Cry

[March 26th, 2008]

Among Jon Stewart’s best jokes at last month’s Academy Awards ceremony was a gibe urging Hollywood to “stay the course” with unprofitable films about fighting in the Middle East: “Withdrawing the Iraq movies would only embolden the audience,” he said. “We cannot let the audience win.” But the latest surge of war movies—the new drama Stop-Loss and the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side both debut Friday—is a reminder that such projects were never intended as an assault on the viewer. They emerged in part from an earnest attempt to grapple with what has happened to American troops. Filmmakers have seen the same images we have—from the horrific hazing photos taken at Abu Ghraib to the recent video of a soldier dropping a puppy off a cliff—and asked the same question we asked: What were they thinking? The difference is that most of us flipped ahead to the sports section, and these directors decided to make movies.

Neither of the latest results quite rises to the level of art; Taxi to the Dark Side is exceptional journalism, and Stop-Loss is a mediocre drama. But both of them are elevated by their sympathetic concern for the mental toll a soldiering life has taken on those who volunteered to fight. Where Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah portrayed U.S. Marines as monsters, and Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs cast its GIs as martyrs, Taxi director Alex Gibney and Stop-Loss helmer Kimberly Peirce have grasped that the kids who sign up for military service are mere teens who often wind up tortured—and sometimes do the torturing themselves.

Peirce, directing her first movie since 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry, has come by her material honestly. Her brother enlisted in the Army after 9/11, and she started on this project as soon as she saw the video montages he and his comrades shot in Afghanistan. Many of these montages, set to the tune of Toby Keith country and Drowning Pool alt-metal, appear in Stop-Loss, and they feel like an honest distillation of combat experience: attempts to express the chaos of what the amateur filmmakers have seen, and simultaneously galvanize their buddies for more fighting. But the rest of the film, which stars Ryan Phillippe as a muscle-bound staff sergeant who resists an unexpected reassignment to Iraq, is far less inspired. Perhaps Peirce is a victim of her own ambitious storytelling efforts: Stop-Loss quickly becomes a field trip through all the unpleasant fates that await returning troops. (If you look to your left, you’ll see post-traumatic stress, alcoholism and a double amputee; on your right is Channing Tatum pretending to cry.) Worse, the movie can’t decide whether Phillippe goes AWOL out of principle or panic. Like most of the characters, he’s an overburdened symbol instead of a person.

Taxi to the Dark Side is far more successful, in part because it begins from a very different perspective. Gibney, who directed Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and produced No End in Sight, has become a sure hand at recording America betraying its own best principles, and here he traces the story of Diliwar, an Afghani cab driver taken to the U.S.-run Bagram prison on a false charge. As the documentary reveals his fate, it makes a persuasive case that it wasn’t an anomaly but part of a systematic program of psychological torment approved at the highest levels of our government, then crudely improvised upon by military police. Instructed to disorient and terrify enemy combatants at Bagram, they blasted them with Metallica songs (yes, the same kind of music they used to pump themselves up). When Diliwar cried out for his mother, they took turns beating him across the legs. Eventually he stopped crying.

The court-martialed soldiers interviewed in Taxi all express remorse, but they often do so in flat, disaffected tones: They were, after all, doing what they were supposed to do, and feelings didn’t factor into it. This may begin to explain why, so far, documentaries about this generation of troops have been far more revealing than their fictional counterparts. People who make movies about Iraq and Afghanistan—and the people who go to see them, for that matter—are a sensitive, enlightened crowd, quick to notice when the enemy is us. The people who fight these wars aren’t meant to be like that. They’re trained to be aggressive, inured to violence, and on the lookout for people trying to kill them. That doesn’t make soldiers inherently better or worse than anybody else. It makes them soldiers. To understand how that mentality can be curdled by poor leadership and a protracted war requires a difficult imaginative leap—one that most directors have yet to make. In combat zones and at the movies, empathy is a casualty of war.