More recently a film released titled Thank You for Your Service. This is another well made look into the lives of those affected by PTSD, home from the war but unable to leave it behind. It is a well written look into emotional damage caused by conditions most of us will never experience. No film will ever be able to fully and accurately convey just how hard acclimating back into society after being on the battlefield really is. For a person who has gone through this, any film broaching the subject will ring hollow because it is virtually impossible to fully dramatize what they went through. To even attempt to dramatize it for an audience to view and empathize with is commendable, even if the end result doesn’t quite hit the bullseye they were aiming for.
Home of the Brave came out in 2006, during a time when America was still battling it out in the Middle East, embroiled in a conflict fired up by the World Trade Center attacks. The film focuses on a handful of soldiers and a doctor who were all caught up in an ambush shortly before deployment back home. Vanessa Price (Jessica Biel) loses her right hand in the ambush, Jamal (Curtis Jackson) kills an innocent woman unintentionally, and Dr. Will Marsh (Samuel L. Jackson) is struggling with a sense of emotional distance, unfeeling towards those around him as he sees young men killed in the line of duty. The fourth soldier, Tommy Yates (Brian Presley), suffers no physical injuries but faces his own trauma that will put him battling his own emotions as well as his family and friends.
Like the two films mentioned above, this film bounces back and forth between the four principles in an attempt to convey how the war has affected them each uniquely. Unlike those other films, Home of the Brave takes shortcuts, failing to really delve into the underlying issues in any meaningful way. What we do get is often generic and not fleshed out. For instance we see scenes of Vanessa struggling to adapt to her artificial limb, unable to do things like pick up a kicked soccer ball, something that would have been so simple to do a year before. When someone offers assistance she puts up her defenses and lashes out. Contrast that with a similar scene in The Best Years of Our Lives when Homer struggles to light a cigarette with his two hooks instead of hands. The first time we see this he is amongst fellow soldiers who patiently allow him to do it himself, knowing how important it is for him to feel able to do things without assistance. Later, amongst family, someone impatiently steps in and does it for him leaving him to feel incapable. The gesture was not in malice but the results are devastating.
A similar short cut is utilized with Jamal who suffered a back injury during the ambush at the beginning. We know he is struggling against the VA for not helping him with his injury. The only reason we know that is a single brief scene of him outside the VA yelling at an aid about this. It’s got all the subtlety of a sledge hammer. Later he will try to see his old girlfriend at her job and, when she won’t talk to him, he comes back (off screen) and takes her and her co-workers hostage. The final results of this feel like the filmmakers were moralizing rather than building a character to any real believable conclusion.
Dr. Marsh gets the best of it, character-wise. His dilemma stems from a feeling of numbness when he thinks he should be emotionally moved in the sight of such horrors. When he returns home he is distant with his wife and overly critical towards his teenage son who is openly protesting President Bush and the war. To those outside his family he seems just fine but his wife knows something is wrong and cannot get through to her emotionally distant husband. Whenever she tries he shuts her out. It’ll take drunkenly assaulting his son at the Thanksgiving table and nearly shooting himself to get him to realize he needs to seek therapy before it destroys his whole family.
The last of the group, Yates, seems on the surface to be handling deployment and his time in the service better than the others. His traumas are a bit more subtle but no less dramatic. He comes home to find the job he thought would be waiting for him is no longer available, forcing him to take whatever he can find. His father is pressuring him to join the police academy but he keeps thinking about re-enlisting and going back to war. Random encounters throw him into a rage, one time actively chasing down another driver in a fit of road rage before realizing he has gone overboard over a simple traffic misstep. Chance encounters with Vanessa, Dr. Marsh and lastly Jamal will eventually push him to an understanding about what they had gotten into in the first place when they enlisted and further convince him that deployed is where he needs to be.
The shortcuts taken to get all these points across and to their resolutions are what ultimately sink what could have been a good dramatic picture. There are just too many characters to give them all satisfactory stories in such a short runtime. The film runs for an hour and forty-five minutes, about twenty of which is used up by the ambush in the first scene. This leaves only an hour-twenty to cover the stories of all four characters, build up their emotional and physical traumas, and provide some form of resolution. That’s roughly twenty minutes apiece. Even factoring in that Jamal gets significantly less screen time than the others doesn’t provide enough time for this story to be told effectively. The Best Years of Our Liveshad a similar sized cast and filled nearly three hours driving this concept home. Home of the Brave doesn’t need to be that long but it did need more time to develop and explore things. This is especially evident in Vanessa’s story. We get to see her lash out at a fellow teacher for offering to help her when she’s struggling physically to do something. Suddenly we’re jumped ahead to the two enjoying a romantic evening as she has allowed him into her life. No bridging scene or real buildup to that final moment. Similarly, Jamal goes from one brief encounter with his ex before later cutting to him inside her workplace holding everyone hostage.
This film is a timely attempt to explore the many different hardships return soldiers face returning to a world that doesn’t understand what the war is really like. It has its heart in the right place but fails to develop any of the characters well enough to get audiences emotionally invested in them. It just cuts too many corners leading to some disjointed, often generic, drama. Some characters get treated better than others in the script but none of them truly get the screen time needed to make this more than a cursory viewing, dramatically it’s frustrating because there are good points to make here, it just fails to do a good enough job at making them.
Release Date: December 15, 2006
Running Time: 106 Minutes
Rated R
Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Jessica Biel, Brian Presley, Curtis Jackson, Christina Ricci and Chad Michael Murray
Directed By: Irwin Winkler
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