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Film of the Week - January 12

addition to the rules - The Messenger
Oren Moverman

Synopsis
Sergeant Montgomery returned from Iraq have received a new assignment: along with Captain Stone will announce to the families of the fallen death of their relatives. A terrible job, hard to bear, William tries to do with posting until it falls in love with one of the women who announced the loss of her husband.


Released last April after nearly a year of incubation, despite the award for best director at the Berlin Film Festival 2009, addition to the rules - The Messenger is one of the great American films of recent years and especially one of the few truly successful works on the war in Iraq.
After so many unnecessary or botched film ( Lions for Lambs or In the Valley of Elah to make an example of two works decent but out of time), the directorial debut of screenwriter Oren Moverman (formerly canditao all ' Oscar I'm Not There), addresses this conflict by a dramatic and controversial point of view. In fact, the film tells the life of those soldiers who have the thankless task of communicating to families facing the death of their relatives: the issue is one of those powerful, which can not remain indifferent, and if possible the film, with its expressive dry , with its ability to convey the emotion and pain on the scene, often using a fixed platen and the sequence makes it even more urgent and intolerable.

addition to the rules is a shot in the chest, a sort of "Ludovico treatment" for the heart, as much as that of A Clockwork Orange it was for the eyes and morality. Overman forces its viewer to look at what you would never see, what, eg, Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan filmed from a distance, in silence and in silhouette, with a woman who came to know of death of her son in war and slumped to the ground overcome with grief. Moverman instead choose to stay with the characters, with the messengers and the victims' side ", located behind the two main characters and the machine that shakes between. In this way, it shows a subjective point of view almost the suffering of others, the consequences of historical madness live on the body of the people involved. The camera does not detach, never interrupts the flow of the scene, but chooses to challenge the highest level of emotional tolerance, perhaps to overcome it and so confront the real consequence of war: the pain and helplessness of those who remain of the beholder .

Because impotence is primarily ours, for us viewers who watched the movie (or listen to or read a news story) and we have nothing else to do but watch, worry or become indignant, but never really suffer. Beyond the rules , however, calls for an investment of responsibility on the part of the viewer. Calls on hold and courage. The stars are the messengers, the relatives of the victims and the suffering we witness the viewers. If you try for once genuinely sorry to see the intolerable length of a scene of grief or surprise, will be the compensation for all the dramatic news digest dinner time, or in front of the computer screen, and immediately forgotten because distant from us.

For once, we'll look and ask why the we are doing. The cinema is at the bottom of this.