Ryan Phillippe stars in Stop Loss as an Iraq war veteran who has to choose between returning to the war zone and disobeying his country.
During his Oscar monologue, Jon Stewart remarked, “The films that were made about the Iraq war [in 2007], let’s face it, did not do as well. But I’m telling you, if we stay the course and keep these movies in theatres we can turn this around.”
Indeed, following the box office failures of In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, Rendition, and Lions for Lambs, the landscape for Iraq-themed Hollywood fare does not look promising. Still, another has crept in under the wire: Stop Loss, the latest from Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry), starring Ryan Phillippe, Victor Rasuk, Rob Brown, and Channing Tatum, a cast that would make any reasonable male momentarily question his sexuality.
The film is about an American soldier (Ryan Phillippe) in the Iraq war forced into serving beyond his discharge date as part of stop-loss, an actual U.S. military policy. Displeased, he runs away, hoping to make it to Washington to explain his situation to his congressman. His experience stands in contrast to that of his friend (Channing Tatum), who plans to return on his umpteenth tour of duty because it’s the only job he can excel at.
“Stop-loss is essentially a backdoor draft,” said Ryan Phillippe in an interview with The Varsity. “People are being forced into combat who don’t want to be there any longer, and I think that’s a pretty terrible situation to put a person in. But hopefully— and this is the way I truly feel about the direction the country’s going— the war is going to end, and we won’t have to be dealing with this in the same capacity. I think that we’re going to get somebody else in there and a new group of people who are going to make a difference.”
This is Kimberly Peirce’s first movie since Boys Don’t Cry. She spent several of the intervening years trying to launch Silent Star, a film about the murder of William Desmond Taylor that was to star Hugh Jackman and Annette Bening. After that project collapsed, she sold Stop Loss to Paramount on spec, unusual for an established filmmaker.
“My brother was fighting in Iraq, and on his leave he brought back videos,” said Peirce. “So I was in my bedroom and heard, ‘Let the bodies hit the floor! Let the bodies hit the floor!’ I went in the living room and I saw him staring at this television at images that soldiers had shot with handheld cameras—[they] put them on a sandbag, or wired them to their humvee—and then they would go back to their barracks and they would cut them together. So I saw that and I was mesmerized. I was like, ‘This is an anthropological find. This is this generation’s war; this is how they’re experiencing it. The movie needs to come from that.’ I took those videos and cut those into a five-minute trailer, went to the studio with a script, five-minute trailer, and I was like, ‘This is the movie.’”
Peirce put a lot of preparation into the making of Stop Loss. “I was interviewing soldiers who were both pro- and anti-war the entire time, and I was taking from their stories these essential truths. So now when soldiers see it, I’m very happy to say that they really love it.”
“In America, the soldiers say, ‘This is my life. This is happening to me, I’m stop-lossed.’ Wives write in, ‘This is happening to us. My husband is not seeing the birth of our child because of stop-loss.’”
Selling Stop Loss to the general public will be a challenge for Paramount Pictures given the apathy shown to previous Iraq films. They have an interesting strategy, though: the poster features the ab-tastic cast wearing tight t-shirts and spread out around a car like something out of an Abercrombie ad. Best of all, Paramount will be partnering in distribution with MTV Films, of all things. Eat your heart out, Paul Haggis!
