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The Messenger Our rating: Your rating:   Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: R (for language and some sexual content and nudity) Genre: Drama Theater release: November 20, 2009 by Oscilloscope Laboratories Directed by: Oren Moverman Runtime: 1 hour 45 minutes Cast: Ben Foster (Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery), Woody Harrelson (Captain Tony Stone), Samantha Morton (Olivia Pitterson), Jena Malone (Kelly), Steve Buscemi (Dale Martin) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Don't shoot the messenger.

Those words echoed in my ears several minutes into this film as Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery interrupted a man working in his yard to tell him that his son had been killed in Iraq. Lashing out with vicious sorrow, the father, Dale Martin (played by Steve Buscemi), trails Montgomery and his commanding officer back to their car, spewing insults, wishing Montgomery, not his son, was dead. "Why weren't you there!"

What this father doesn't know—and probably doesn't want to know—is that Montgomery was there. Played with remarkable control and nuance by Ben Foster, the young sergeant has recently returned from the Middle East after a dramatic brush with his own death. Not that you'll find any explosive flashbacks in The Messenger. The screenplay by director Oren Moverman (I'm Not There, Married Life) and Alessandro Camon focuses on the aftermath of war, a quieter-but-no-less-intense companion to this summer's The Hurt Locker.

Ben Foster as Will Montgomery

Back at home and recovering from injuries seen and unseen, Montgomery is assigned to spend his last few months in the military as a member of the Army's Casualty Notification Team. He protests that he neither received nor gave any grief counseling himself (hinting at his own harrowing story) and is unqualified for the task. But he quickly learns that as a member of this team, his job is succinct—deliver the news. That's all. No counseling. Under no circumstances do you touch the NOK (next of kin, in Army parlance). Notify. Express official condolences. Get in and get out.

Montgomery is put under the command of the hardnosed Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson), given a pager, and, after a bracing speech from Stone, told to be ready. He pours over a thick, three-ring binder of protocol during nights at his barely furnished apartment where he gets drunk, eats soup from a can, and sometimes sleeps on the floor rather than his bed. After observing Stone in action, Montgomery's first task on the job is to notify Martin about his son's death. As you might expect, thick, three-ring binders are as good as talismans when face-to-face with the NOK; you can never be ready. Or as Stone says after a particularly fraught notification, "There's no such thing as a satisfied customer."

Dealing in patriotism, sacrifice, heroism, and love, The Messenger could easily be suffused with melodrama and cliche. Instead, the movie manages to be emotionally charged without being saccharine—unflinching in the face of grief, the movie stops shy of making a voyeuristic spectacle of the raw pain Montgomery and Stone's visits trigger.

Woody Harrelson as Capt. Tony Stone

The same deft footwork is shown in the way the characters are drawn. It would have been easy to make a kind of modern-warfare caricature out of Montgomery, giving him a one-note angst—just one PTSD-induced nightmare away from losing it. Instead, Foster's performance is full of pathos, revealing quiet strength and even nascent wisdom as he grapples with the disparity between the idea and the reality of words like "hero."

Harrelson plays Stone with a kind of porous bravado, as a man who has made some sense of his life by being a part of the military, but who also harbors deep insecurity about his own service. Thrice married, he now prefers his sex without strings and maintains a tenuous grasp on sobriety.

The friendship that develops between Montgomery and Stone is halting at first, but sputters to life as the men go about sharing their particularly burdensome task. Despite the fact that Stone insists the Army is the best possible family, that the Army takes care of you, it's clear throughout the movie that the experience of war isolates soldiers not only from their actual families, but also from other soldiers. In each other, the sergeant and captain find an unexpected respite from this isolation, eventually revealing their own war stories to one another.

Samantha Morton as Olivia Pitterson

The always-superb Samantha Morton plays Olivia Pitterson, an NOK with whom Montgomery strikes up a relationship in the wake of her husband's death. And as with so many aspects of this movie, what seems in danger of being maudlin is instead poignant and thoughtful. A scene that finds the two in her kitchen pondering whether they should move to the bedroom is one of the most affecting depictions of heartbreak and desire I've seen. There is a profound kindness between these two, the relational equivalent of a deep, cleansing breath.

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