The Messenger

It would seem natural that Israeli combat veteran Oren Moverman’s directorial debut would delve into the heavy moral morass of military life and its discontents. Already having made a name for himself in the industry adapting Denis Johnson (whose heavily visual prose in Jesus’ Son already seem blocked out and halfway art directed), and, in concert w/ director Todd Haynes, the various parallel texts mythological that cohabitate under the aegis of "Bob Dylan," Moverman appears to have a handle on the complex interplay of inner and outer worlds running alongside one another (or outer worlds on top of other outer worlds), an understanding of the dexterity required to make slippery texts, subtexts, and metatexts conceptually cohere, and an ear for oddball countercultural American vernacular not actually uncommon to foreigners perhaps because one is forced to hone ones depth perception when operating outside of ones native tongue (think Kafka). That being said, none of these apparent assets is evident from The Messenger: all that is left is talk, talk, talk. There is clearly a good film to be made on the subject of men whose job it is to notify next of kin that their loved one has died in combat, perhaps w/ the bulk of this cast, and perhaps w/ Mr. Moverman calling the shots. This is certainly not that movie. Despite the high-test quality of the two central leads (Ben Foster as wounded-in-action Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery and Woody Harrelson as Captain Tony Stone, recovering alcoholic military lifer secretly ashamed to have never seen combat), they are consistently made to masticate heavily telegraphed dialogue that sounds an awful lot like writing. Though a wonderful actress, Samantha Morton has to deal w/ the worst of it, forced to trade in dross that would be impossible to sell even in the mouth of an actress more suited to the part of a sexually compelling working class American woman w/ a half-black kid. Samantha Morton has become more asexual as her giant forehead increasingly leads her around and her eyes look out of the screen like huge, glossy cries for help – every time I see her these days I can only think of that ethereal, wide-eyed and amniotic human battery she played in Minority Report. What ever happened to the hot-mess firecracker who first made herself known to me fucking-the-pain-away her way through Under the Skin? She is not the problem though. All of the characters say things that no one would ever say, moving episodically through sets that feel like empty casks in which no one has ever lived, emotional payoff falls out of the sky and goes kersplat, and the dead-in-its-tracks romance between achy-broken Foster and nervous android Morton is sickeningly creepy in a way Moverman is apparently unaware of, leaving one to wonder if he actually sees this stalking and cagey cornering as fucking redemptive (?). The Messenger remains refreshingly free of message in the big picture but remains chalk-full of tiny little moment-to-moment messages that are persistently spelled out and scattered condescendingly about our feet like birdseed. So far the critics have been gobbling it up. Personally, I hunger for something more substantial. I remain convinced, however, that when people start using him right Ben Foster will be one of this generation's finest actors. Maybe he needs to be playing shy-but-hyper like he did when he was a kid. Here he just barely doesn't quite totally suck. Professional pothead Woody Harrelson actually takes him to town. Goddamn!