The Messenger
Member Oren Moverman's movie The Messenger opens this weekend. Oren will be doing some Q&A's at the theaters this weekend; it is opening at the Angelica and Lincoln Plaza.
From the review in this week's New Yorker:
In “The Messenger,” Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson), an Army lifer with a shaved head and a face like a cement block, and Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery (Ben Foster), a coiled, secretive Iraq-war hero, work together in one of the most difficult jobs in the armed services: informing parents and spouses that a loved one has been killed. They tell them immediately, hard upon the death, before the news can appear on the Internet or in the local paper. Messengers? For the families, the sternly polite men, arriving at the door in bemedalled uniforms and tilted berets, seem to be death itself. There’s an excruciatingly obvious but unavoidable irony here: “The Messenger” has also taken on the unwelcome task of telling its audience what it doesn’t much want to hear—how families are devastated by war. Yet the film is neither dutiful nor solemn. This is a fully felt, morally alert, marvellously acted piece of work. Despite the grim subject, it’s a sweet-tempered movie, with moments of explosive humor—an entertainment.
The picture was written not by Americans but by two foreign-born men working in Hollywood—Alessandro Camon, an Italian, and Oren Moverman, the director, who is a four-year veteran of the Israeli military. If these two missed certain shades of American colloquial speech, my ear didn’t detect it. The movie is by turns loquacious and raptly silent, and Moverman, directing for the first time, is tremendously talented at handling actors; he gives them the time and the space to work out characters who have layers and corners and shadows. We get to know these men well, yet we still think of them as mysterious.
