An extraordinary Iraq war film takes place at home-at homes--and moves through wartime experience known generally yet generally disregarded. The Messenger is about the Army’s Casualty Notification office. When a soldier is killed, two uniformed soldiers, usually decorated veterans, are sent to the soldier’s home to notify the next of kin personally. (A letter from the secretary of the Army soon follows.) Notification personnel are bound by strict rules of behavior--“Do Not Touch the N.O.K.” is one of them--but no rules can protect the messengers from deep effect on themselves.
Good films, we all know by now, begin with good screenplays. Even if that adage is not invariably true, it is certainly the case here. The Messenger was written by Oren Moverman and Alessandro Camon, and it vibrates throughout with dialogue so taut and incisive that it not only fits what is happening, it is itself gratifying. The writers have, among other glints, utilized what are apparently clichés of army talk in such a way that they affirm army life as a universe. “Bullets fly, and soldiers die.” The captain who says this has presumably heard it many times, and his very familiarity with it makes it fitting rather than stale.
The precise dialogue is all the more remarkable because Moverman, who also directed, was born in Israel, where he served four years as an infantryman in the Israel Defense Forces. His ear is now tuned to America: he has written previous scripts in this country. But out of experience, he seems here to be relying on a freemasonry among soldiers of most countries that, friendly with one another or not, enables them to understand spoken and unspoken things about one another.
Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery, recently wounded in Iraq and decorated, is relieved from active duty and assigned to work with Captain Tony Stone on a notification team. Stone, a veteran long past disillusion, is friendly-stiff with Montgomery, and the sergeant, expecting nothing in particular, obeys orders, period. Together they make six visits of notification during the film. The first N.O.K., a father, becomes furious at them, almost violent. Another father simply becomes ill on the spot.
But The Messenger could not merely be a chronicle of those visits, and not just because they are terrible. Those visits are part--huge but only a part--of the team’s lives. Between times we learn more about Stone and Montgomery, in the past and the present. Stone, a former drunk, says that he has been married three times, twice to the same woman. We have seen at the very start something of Montgomery’s private life, a visit to his apartment by an ex-girlfriend who is now affianced elsewhere. We see him moving, at first a bit awkwardly, into his new duty. The two men drink and eat and get to know each other. We see their professional experience knitting them. At one point, they more or less provoke a fistfight with three men just because, we sense, they want to vent their own stopped-up feelings. Later on, when the two men have been seasoned together by their notification visits as if they had been in battle together, they turn up slightly soused, and very out of dress, at the engagement party of Montgomery’s earlier girl. By this time, we can believe that their disarray represents inner disorder.
The script makes few concessions to movieness. One element might be the result of a story conference call for a non-grim element, but the writing and the performances of this material are so touching that it does not intrude. Montgomery becomes fond of a young woman who is now, as he and Stone have told her, a widow. She, reticent and a touch embarrassed, subsequently responds to the sergeant as a man. The attraction between them takes us because she suggests subtly that, in an intricate sense, he has been to her an emissary for her husband, a vicar. And he, aware of both the inappropriateness and the truth of his feeling, is ready for her.
Thus scenes that might have seemed sheer audience compensation in other hands are germane with Moverman. He has taste and invention and discretion. The blunt moments of death notification are done with variety but no sense of straining for variety. The scenes between the two soldiers off-duty never mention the notification job--except for one blunder that Montgomery makes--yet they are steeped in the experience. The scenes between the woman and the sergeant have almost no physical contact yet are full of feeling. The very last scene, which is between these two, is capped with a graceful elision.
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