www.burlingtonfreepress.com
by Susan Green
Directed by Oren Moverman from a screenplay co-authored with Alessandro Camon, the film offers a distinct perspective about how an armed conflict thousands of miles away can radically alter lives back in America. The focus is on two soldiers assigned to inform relatives that their sons, daughters, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, brothers or sisters have been killed in Iraq.
Woody Harrelson plays a recovering alcoholic and Gulf War vet already hardened for this awful task. Ben Foster’s more sensitive character, physically and emotionally wounded from Iraqi combat, is attracted to a new widow (portrayed by Samantha Morton) as much by her pain as her beauty.
“What distinguishes Moverman’s very well-written and acted film is an attempt to unite the woes of veterans and those they left behind through the grim (but apt) device of foregrounding ‘casualty notification,’” critic Richard Porton, an editor at Cineaste magazine in New York, observes in an email. “Also the love affair between Nelson and Morton is admirably complex and non-saccharine.”
“The Messenger” won the Peace Award and a prize for best screenplay at February’s Berlin Film Festival. It has also garnered various nominations from the Independent Spirit Awards, the Screen Actors Guild and the Golden Globes; the National Board of Review put the production on its top-10 list for 2009.
As befits the film’s spare approach, there’s almost no score. At one point the two protagonists sing an a cappella version of “Home on the Range.” Over the closing credits, an unseen Willie Nelson croons the same tune. Instead of segueing into other musical selections, as most movies do, there is merely ambient noise: birds chirping, dogs barking, wind in the trees.










 

