Bearer of Bad News

Even though “The Messenger” deals with the war in Iraq in a way that not too many films before it have, don’t make the assumption that it’s a war movie. Where most war movies are driven by the urgency of survival, “The Messenger” is more interested in what it means to make the ultimate sacrifice, and the way that loved ones are affected afterward. Actually, “ultimate sacrifice” isn’t the kind of euphemism that anyone here would use – Capt. Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson), whose duty it is to report the deaths of various soldiers to their families, doesn’t bother using terms like “lost,” “passed away” or any other language that dances around the fact that they were killed. “We need to be clear,” he says. “Say ‘killed’ or ‘died.’”

Stone passes this lesson along to Staff Sgt. Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) when he’s assigned to train him for the job, which Stone warns him isn’t as easy as it sounds. Apart from dealing with melancholy family members who take their pain out on them, the most difficult part for Montgomery might be resisting the urge to comfort them: Stone tells him that something as small as a hug would violate protocol.

That doesn’t seem like a very big problem at first, particularly for someone like Montgomery, whose capacity for tenderness is limited to his shallow love affair with a friend’s fiancée (Jena Malone). Over time, though, Montgomery has a change of heart, and understands the gravity that comes with this job. He’s especially affected by a widow named Olivia (Samantha Morton), who doesn’t seem nearly as wounded by her husband’s death as Montgomery would’ve thought: She says that’s because when they were last together, he didn’t seem like the person he was before he left.

A movie like this might’ve fallen flat on its face without the right actors to make it believable, and for everything that Foster and Harrelson have to pull off, they still manage to hit all the right notes – although their dialogue is well-written, they know how to use their behavior to say what their lines couldn’t.

As good as they are at making everything here work, the supporting actors make the most of their screen time with sensational drama, and they understand that their characters have every right to be upset when a total stranger tells them that their loved ones are dead. The most powerful of these performances is Steve Buscemi’s as an enraged and heartbroken father – even though he takes it out on the wrong people, he’s too emotional to think in terms of right and wrong. When Stone cautioned that this job isn’t as easy as it sounds, he probably said more than he realized.

These days the Iraq War isn’t in the forefront of the news, but the film “The Messenger” not only brings it back into the hearts and minds of the audience and the country, but also bridges a gap between the battlefield and the reality back home. Amazingly, this film documents the urgency of war in the present time without ever showing one scene in the Middle East.

Aside from the grave importance of reminding people that the country is still at war, it is also a study of the human need for connection and the different ways in which people deal with grief. Every character in the film is longing for a relationship – Harrelson’s character looking for the camaraderie of brothers in war because he never saw action in Desert Storm; Foster’s character searching for a meaningful relationship with a woman; and Morton’s character looking to Foster to fill those empty spaces between the relationship she had with her deceased husband, and the loss of him.

The most standout aspect of “The Messenger” is that it peels away a layer of protection that people have when it comes to dealing with grief and the loss of a loved one. The film shows the brutality of the moment when one learns that someone near to them has passed, but also the difficulty that the person delivering the news has as well, thus leaving us with a powerful picture of both sides of a tough situation.

-Cynthia Spataro