However, she plays the secondary victim, the wife of the man who comes home from war and has difficulty adjusting to civilian life.
The main character is James (Ryan O’Nan), who’s home from Afghanistan, but can’t leave it behind him. He visits his Mom, Martha (Melissa Leo, in a stellar support performance), who’s sick now, and hardly has enough strength to get out of her house, where she lives simply, and alone. But at least she continues to show him what unconditional love is like. He’s delighted to see his wife, Sarah. But she soon senses what a brooding, unhappy presence he is. The first night, she wakes up to being choked by him, in an apparent waking-nightmare that he won’t then discuss. His former best friend Michael (Jason Ritter) he now suspects of having too much interest in making sure Sarah is OK. The only job available to him seems to be in a local slaughterhouse, where we are graphically reminded of all the blood and guts which still haunt him. His buddy Michael takes him out drinking with a co-worker, who winds up getting into a fight with James. Sarah sees James as someone angry, violence-prone, and unwilling to communicate, so she tells him she’s going to stay with her parents until he gets some help.
James goes to a local VA facility, where the doctor gives him some pills for anxiety, and gives him the name of a P.T.S.D. counselor. Instead, James journeys to see an old buddy (Raymond Gonzalez) from his unit, and together they take a “road trip” to Walter Reed Hospital to see another buddy who’s still dealing with very serious injuries (he appears to be a multiple amputee, but we’re not really shown the details). It only takes a few moments to laugh about some old times, and then it’s the seriously traumatic business of being out of control (the friend physically, and they emotionally). James claims he’s forgotten about what, exactly, happened on their tour (trying to avoid the crass curiosity of those who can’t possibly know what it was like). But talking to his buddies convinces James that he has good reason to be traumatized, and the fact that they aren’t over it, either, gives him a strange kind of comfort: it’s easier feeling like you’re going crazy if you have some company when you go there.
We root for James because he’s genuinely trying to find his way in a bewildering world that will never be the same as what he has always known. When his mother gets even sicker, he at least gains an opportunity to try to explain things to Sarah, and we hope that somehow they can find a way back toward each other.
This is a gritty, real-life, low-budget-feeling film, about people who live in trailers, and drive beat-up pickup trucks, and go to bars to drink shots and get into fistfights, and work as bartenders or hookers or butchers or cashiers. There’s nothing glamorous or slick or high-tech or funny or exciting about it. But it feels like the real thing. And it deserves a hearing, if for no other reason than to raise the awareness of the rest of us oblivious citizens, about what really happens to our soldiers who fight for us “over there,” and come back damaged from the experience.
RONALD P. SALFEN is pastor, Grace Church, Greenwood, Texas
