The Messenger 2009
This is a war movie that doesn’t take place in a war. Instead it deals with a young sergeant in the Army, still recovering from wounds he received in Iraq, and assigned to a Casualty Notification Team, telling families their loved have been killed. Usually in the movies these guys just show up, deliver the bad news, and are gone. But this movie shows what they do. It’s not easy work. They simply aren’t allowed to be too comforting and must follow the script about “The Secretary of Defense regrets to inform you . . .” There are other teams that do the counseling; these guys just deliver the bad news hopefully before the family hears it from anyone else. The sergeant’s superior officer is played by Woody Harrelson as a guy who was in the first Gulf war, but has never done the hard fighting he trained to do and that everyone he knows has done.
That’s basically it. There is a very awkward romance thrown in and you get to know both of these guys better, mostly the sergeant, played by Ben Foster, who is asked to do this job even though he could really use some counseling himself for what he went through. The movie probably could have tried to be about a lot more, but it succeeds in telling a small story that is part of the bigger story of the Iraq war. The DVD extras are very good, showing that the filmmakers worked with the Army to get things right and talks to people who do casualty notifications in real life.
Written: 07 Aug 2010