Delayed Reaction: The Messenger

Premise: An Army staff sergeant finishes out his last few months before discharge by serving as a casualty notification officer.

I only made two notes while watching this:

• That's awful early for a sex scene
• This movie is punishing.

The first note is on there, because it's rare that I see boobs before I'm even finished writing down the title. The second note is the crux of the movie though. This movie is emotionally punishing. This should be obvious. It's a movie about telling family members that a loved one has died. Some premises don't need much to add stakes. This one establishes those quickly. The aspect that I hadn't considered before is that it's a race to be the first to tell the family. Remember how Kobe Bryant's family found out he had died from TMZ? The army wants to avoid that (on a much smaller scale, or course). So, even though it's not strictly life-and-death, it is, I guess clock-and-death.

There are several powerful scenes in this. They kept finding new ways to punch the audience in the gut. There's the pregnant girlfriend who legally has to wait to hear the news with the officers in the room waiting on his mother. There's the sweethearts who married in secret getting exposed by news of his death. How about the parents who find out in a store instead of at home? This movie gets those scenes very right. There will never be a documentary following people doing this around (for good reason), so this is the closest most of us will get to seeing these moments.

This fits neatly into both lead actors' strengths. Ben Foster loves character work, but when oddball characters aren't an option, he does explosive rage well too. Woody Harrelson is excellent at composed losers: guys who can put themselves together enough to look like they have all the answers even though they are bigger screw-ups than anyone else in the room.

Unfortunately, the movie can't just be a series of vignettes about officers delivering bad news to familiar actors live Steve Buscemi and Samantha Morton. It has to have a plot too, and that's where it lost me. It's been a while since I've seen a film with something new to say about PTSD. It's a lot of thousand-yard stares, blaring angry music, drinking, and standard self-destructive behavior. While I agree that PTSD is bad, depictions of it are getting tired. I hated the stuff about Foster cozying up with Morton after he was the one who delivered the news of her husband's death. The same with Harrelson relapsing. It felt like the movie was trying too hard to make an inherently interesting subject more interesting.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend