Oren Moverman (2009)

The film has taken a long time to make it across the Atlantic:  it opened in London more than eighteen months after its commercial release in the US in November 2009.  Co-written by Oren Moverman (whose first feature this is) and Alessandro Camon, The Messenger tells the story of Will Montgomery (Ben Foster), a US Army staff sergeant who, on his return home from Iraq, is assigned to the Army’s Casualty Notification service.  This means he has to break bad news to the next of kin of soldiers killed in action.  Will is partnered in this grim work by the older, unhappily experienced Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson).  Both of them live isolated lives outside their work.  Stone keeps himself going with prostitutes.  Will, as we learn early on, had a close relationship with a girl (Jena Malone) but they broke off their engagement.  He now lives alone, drinks plenty.  There are strong hints that a particular experience in Iraq has traumatised him.  (The revelation of the experience is delayed until late on in The Messenger.)  One of the essential rules of the messengers’ line of work is not to let personal feelings get in the way, let alone become involved with the people they visit.   It’s no less an imperative in screen fictions that rules of this kind are there to be broken for dramatic purposes.  Will, following an unusual solo visit to break the news of her husband’s death to a young woman called Olivia Pitterson (Samantha Morton), finds himself falling in love with her.

As that implies, the script for The Messenger is basically conventional – and it is in other ways too.  Each home visit by Will and Stone has an obvious complicating variation.  On Will’s first assignment with Stone, a dead soldier’s mother isn’t at home; in her absence, protocol doesn’t allow them to reveal their bad news to his girlfriend.  The next visit, there’s no answer when they ring the doorbell and they’re about to leave as the casualty’s father appears from the garden.  Another boy’s parents are out – Will and Stone bump into them accidentally in a local store and tell them there.  A bereaved wife is having an affair, and in the middle of a row with her lover, when the messengers arrive.  There’s nothing wrong with this approach (and each of these scenes is well staged and acted), except that Moverman and Camon’s need to ‘dramatise’ the episodes seems to betray an anxiety that the visits wouldn’t be interesting enough without embellishment.  It’s an unnecessary anxiety because the line of work is inherently dramatic; the regulations the two men have to stick by in making their announcements only increases that.   In the closing stages, the tidy-minded writers are similarly anxious to get loose ends tied up; and there’s occasional overwriting in what the characters have to say when they’re speaking their mind.  It’s a miscalculation when Will and Stone turn up, very much the worse for wear, at the wedding reception of Will’s ex-fiancee (he was invited to the reception but had said no).  This public demonstration of the pair’s bitter isolation is crudely melodramatic – and out of character.

Yet Moverman and Camon’s screenplay is serviceable, the dialogue is mostly good, and the actors, well directed by Moverman, are able to take The Messenger to a higher level.  Although you feel the relationship between Will and Olivia is a dramatic requirement, you want it to happen – and to succeed – because the characters matter.  And the sequence in which Will eventually tells Stone what happened to him in Iraq is extremely well done.   It’s hard to say which is more affecting:  Woody Harrelson’s despairing gulp to try to control his emotions (he seems to swallow a yell) or Ben Foster’s gesture of discretion when he sees that Stone’s crying and Will leaves the room to let him weep in private.  (It’s very good that the man who learns what happened is more upset than the one who confesses what happened.)  When Olivia tells Will her feelings about her late husband, Samantha Morton makes those feelings intensely believable.  Olivia was increasingly unhappy in the marriage; when Will arrived at her home she was hanging out washing, including her husband’s shirts, as if cleaning him out of her life. ‘Then you came’, she says to Will.  His arrival doesn’t just mean to Olivia a new man in her life; it means that, now he’s dead, she can love her husband again.  This makes complete sense of the way Samantha Morton plays Olivia’s first meeting with Will:  as usual, she creates rhythms which feel surprising but true.

I’d not seen Ben Foster before and I liked him a lot.   His blend of ordinariness and emotional power, his ability to suggest a specific intelligence at work – these qualities raise hopes that Foster may be able to play all sorts of roles.  He and Woody Harrelson are a very effective partnership:  Will and Stone, for all their differences, are kindred spirits in the sense that they’re both deeply screwed up but have worked out ways to soldier on.  Stone has a borderline-psycho look and a practised verbal aggression but Harrelson isn’t overacting here.  He uses these externals to suggest armour; he has an inner intensity that occasionally fractures the armour.  Steve Buscemi has a memorable cameo as the man whose gardening is irredeemably interrupted by the message Will and Stone have come to deliver.

22 June 2011