Stop-Loss: Good ol' boys gone bad, courtesy of the red, white and blue

Whisking us from a nail-biting ambush in a Tikrit alleyway to drunken punch-ups deep in the heart of Texas, the first act of Stop-Loss wisely sets a tone of visceral urgency right off the top. For all its emphasis on matters of immediate political import, this is not a film that benefits whatsoever from slowing things down or getting too contemplative. Often awkward in its storytelling yet commendably sincere and suitably messy, Stop-Loss packs a solid emotional whollop even while it dances around an issue at once timely and, perhaps as a result, irresolvable.

A group of pals, first seen singing Toby Keith’s moronically patriotic country anthem in lumbering unison, return home from a tour in Iraq, the whole lot of them destined for a wicked blanket diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. Their façade of ass-kicking bravado swiftly slips away to reveal a grotesque grimace of fear and guilt. Their superior actually needs to command them not to beat their wives and kids while on leave –for all the good it does. These good ol’ boys gone bad waste no time going ballistic, ending their celebratory return home by busting up the living room and using the wedding presents given to an already destroyed couple for pissed-up target practice out on the ranch.

Immediately after being awarded a purple heart at the end of what was to be his second and final tour, Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) is unexpectedly ordered to return for a third go-round, bound by a legal loophole referred to as a stop-loss, which allows the US military to send soldiers back in a time of war. King points out that the President already publicly stated that the Iraq War is over, but his insurgent reasoning does him no favours when dealing with shouting jarheads all to aware that the numbers of volunteer enlistees are way, way down. Sent to the stockade to think things over, King soon goes AWOL, hitting the road with his best friend’s girl (Abbie Cornish, superb, an din her quiet way the heart of the movie) in the hope of finding a friendly authority figure who can help him wriggle out of going beyond the call of duty.

Stop-Loss is the fist feature to be directed by Kimberly Pierce since Boys Don’t Cry, her lauded debut from nine years back. Stop-Loss shares its predecessor’s deft handling of regional folk –she neither sentimentalizes or takes pot shots at small town Texans– but its script isn’t nearly as focused. Written by Pierce and Mark Richard, the film fumbles with corny flashbacks, boilerplate dialogue and too many overwrought scenes where the characters, otherwise defined by their inability to articulate their inner turmoil, announce the themes to us rather than evoke them. Yet somehow, these deficiencies never entirely get in the way of the film’s integrity or vigour. There isn’t enough artistry, poetry or perspective here to make this The Deer Hunter for our era, but there is a huge commitment to conveying the raw, fresh wreckage of lives fucked-up by senseless violence, and that’ll do just fine before one comes along.

Signals of wonder, despair and genius in Tree of Smoke

Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $31) begins with a pair of deaths, one being that of a US president, the other a monkey somewhere deep in the perspiring tangle of Filipino jungle. It is somehow indicative of the peculiar and complex moral concerns of this novel that the monkey’s demise is the more affecting. As is the fact that both of these deaths are assassinations by rifle, executed by American boys with American military training, boys caught up in some scheme far greater than they’re capable of comprehending.

Denis Johnson’s new novel, the most deserving winner of the National Book Award, is sprawling, ambitious, at times delirious, as labyrinthine as the Southeast Asian jungles it regularly returns to. It is a messy, profound and vehemently imperfect sort of masterpiece that attempts to grapple with the Vietnam War, the whole damned thing, in one monolithic block of text, arguably making it akin to Don DeLillo’s Underworld, which selected The Cold War as its one massive historical essence to conjure, and grapple with. It is as huge and demanding in every way as Johnson’s previously most famous novel Jesus’ Son (1992) was intimate, oneiric and diminutive. It’s the sort of novel that generates incredible excitement, and will likely come to be resented by readers who prefer their Emperors naked, and reduce Johnson’s brick of prose to an unruly, disorganized and inordinately defiant stunt. Me? I was enthralled.

Though it’s tricky to pin down a single protagonist in Tree of Smoke, I guess it must be Skip Sands, an idealistic young man from Kansas developing a career in intelligence. Yet in reading the book I became so attached to the Houston brothers, two shaggily likable guys –one of whom was first seen in Johnson’s Angels (1983)– whisked from a most arid Arizona and dropped into alien fields of blood, chaos, decay, cheap beer and prostitutes. There’s also an aid worker from Winnipeg, and a couple of Vietnamese military men who charge Johnson’s grand wash of a narrative with palpable feeling, personality and much humour as it rattles its way from 1963 all the way to 1983.

On display here are many of the idiosyncratic rhetorical jewels that have made Johnson’s voice such a witty, memorable one. He writes terrific dialogue in broken English, a skill that gives a special potency and pointed humour to moments of despair. There are countless character descriptions like this one: “He was both barrel-chested and pot-bellied, also bowlegged, also sunburned… He wore a silver flattop haircut on a head like an anvil.” Yet there are also passages of character development deftly handled through ribald, well-chosen juxtaposition: “Skip was afraid of women. The pork chops came, succulent, moist.” And there is the constant undercurrent of rationalizations for the imposition of force and ideology, and the hows and whys of the US in Vietnam: “The land is their myth. We penetrate the land, we penetrate their national soul.”

Considering the many correlations to be made between the US-led war addressed in Tree of Smoke and the one going on today in Iraq, it might be useful to boil it all down to one of Johnson’s pet themes, the power of karma. Karma mounts like a terrible, out of control mass, feeding on brutality, delusion and betrayal, as the novel lurches toward its devastating finale. But karma is also considered eloquently right in the opening pages, following that seemingly incidental slaying of a monkey: “He had expected to be made to see it again; so he was relieved to be walking back to the club without having to look at what he’d done. Yet he understood, without much alarm or unease, that he wouldn’t be spared this sight forever.”

(This review originally appeared in The Edmonton Journal.)