The Soldier's Tale

THE SOLDIER’S TALE (Penny Allen, France/US, 2007, 52 min.). THEMES: PTSD (ANXIETY DISORDERS); IMPACT OF MENTAL ILLNESS ON THE FAMILY (FAMILY); DIVORCE (RELATIONSHIPS); POST-TRAUMATIC PERSONALITY CHANGES (PERSONALITY DISORDERS); WAR (SOCIAL & LEGAL ISSUES). In 2004, Penny Allen, an American narrative filmmaker who has lived and worked in Paris for the past 15 years, was flying home to Portland, Oregon, because of her mother’s death. By chance, her adjoining seatmate was a soldier, an Army Sergeant, who was returning home on leave at the midpoint of his 12-month deployment in Iraq (he is referred to only as “Sgt. R.”) They struck up a conversation about Sgt R’s experiences in Iraq. Subsequently, and unexpectedly to Ms.Allen, he sent to Paris many still photos and a video entitled “War is Hell” filmed by Sgt. R and a number of his soldier buddies during their tour of duty. He expressed to Ms.Allen his hope that she would use the material to increase public awareness of the awful nature of war.
Moved by her encounter and the visual material, some of it disturbingly graphic, Ms. Allen set forth to film a documentary for French television. To complement the in-country material, she also conducted and filmed a five hour interview with Sgt. R, about a year after his return. The result is The Solder’s Tale, a brief (52 minute), balanced, apolitical and entirely arresting story about the rigors of insurgency and counterinsurgency combat, spanning not only the uncertainty of survival and the anguish of loss and maiming of lives, but also the exhilaration and lure that soldiering can elicit. The difficulties coming home, including marital disruption, and clear signs of chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), are also addressed. This film’s one significant flaw is that, in edited scenes from the 5 hour interview conducted by Ms. Allen with Sgt. R, her voice comes through loud and clear, but the Sergeant, unfortunately, is a mumbler, and one misses a number of his presumably important comments. In spite of this drawback, and my wish for a longer, somewhat deeper presentation, I find this to be one of the most poignantly revealing war stories I have viewed on screen. Penny Allen was present at this screening to provide the backstory of the making of the film. She has posted several photo strips prepared from Sgt. R's material which can be seen at her website, http://www.pennyallen.info. Grade: A- (01/07)

http://www.psychflix.com/reviews_s-z.html#soldiers_tale

The Sweet Hereafter

THE SWEET HEREAFTER (Atom Egoyan, Canada, 1997) THEMES: BEREAVEMENT; IMPACT OF TRAUMA (LOSS OF CHILDREN IN SCHOOLBUS ACCIDENT) ON FAMILY AND COMMUNITY. Russell Banks wrote poignantly about the far reach of trauma on people. One of his stories led to the film Affliction, about a violent, alcoholic father’s indelible scarring of a son. This film, based on a true story, concerns the citizens of a remote town in northern British Columbia. A school bus crash kills 14 children. A big time lawyer, played amazingly well by Ian Holm, comes to town months later to try to persuade the affected families to file a lawsuit against the authorities and the bus manufacturer. We see the gradual polarization of the town into those who want to press legally for compensation and those who want to turn away and avoid the pain of continuing involvement in the matter. Most importantly, this film yields a vividly realistic, thoughtful look at the varieties of response to loss. Grade: A (12/97)

http://www.psychflix.com/reviews_s-z.html#the_sweet_hereafter

Shake Hands with the Devil

SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire (Peter Raymont, Canada, 2005, 91 m). THEMES: PTSD; MORAL ISSUES IN THE MILITARY. Roméo Dallaire, a French Canadian career soldier, a lieutenant general in the Canadian Army, was sent to head up the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda in early autumn, 1993. (the sympathetic UN military officer portrayed by Nick Nolte in the film Hotel Rwanda is loosely based on Gen. Dallaire.) He stayed at his post through the 100 day genocidal disaster in the spring of 1994, unable to stem the slaughter of 500 to 800 thousand people (although his tiny force was responsible for saving about 25,000). He was psychologically devastated by this experience and suffered for several years from suicidal depression, alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder.
.
Dallaire eventually retired from the army and has attempted more recently to put his life together again. This film, a documentary/memoir based on his 2003 book, “Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda,” is part of that effort.The film and book tell Gen. Dallaire’s personal story of Rwanda and its aftermath. For more details about the Rwandan tragedy, go to my other website,
AtkinsonOnFilm.com, and access my review of this film under current cinema.
.
By the end of the genocidal slaughter, Dallaire had become almost unable to function, issuing orders and dictating memoranda that were incoherent, according to his executive assistant at the time, Major Brent Beardsley. This most likely represented some mixture of acute stress disorder and depression. But beyond that immediate period, Gen. Dallaire was broken by the Rwandan experience, blaming himself for not finding an approach that would have succeeded in mobilizing UN support from higher ups to prevent or stop the killings. For the next several years he suffered from prolonged depressive episodes and heavy drinking, and needed to be hospitalized at one point. Medications now stave off most depressive symptoms. But he continues to suffer from symptoms of PTSD: severe survival guilt and distressing, incessant images (flashbacks) of the carnage in 1994.
With his depression stabilized and his sobriety now restored (I infer the latter because he is the only one drinking orange juice at a recent reunion of his UN Rwanda staff shown in the film), Dallaire then wrote his memoir, entered into this film project and recently attended the 10th anniversary gathering in Kigali, honoring the dead and their surviving families. He was welcomed as a hero, a label he rejects, by the Rwandan President and addressed a crowd in the same stadium where his soldiers had sheltered 12,000 people 10 years earlier. Such steps can be seenn as excellent reparative efforts to reduce his residual guilt and proneness to depression.
.
Today, among other projects, Gen. Dallaire serves as a consultant to various entities concerned with preventing PTSD. This film is almost unique in portraying chronic stress disorder in a military leader, based at least in part on his sense of moral responsibility for not being able to do more. Rarely are high ranking officers willing to disclose so much publicly, even after retirement. Grade B (overall film quality); A- (for the unusual view of PTSD in a military leader. (10/05)

Grvbavica

GRBAVICA (Jasmila Žbanić, Bosnia, 2006, 91 m.). THEME: POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER (WOMEN). SPOILER ALERT! Intimate, soulful story of Esma (Mirjana Karanovic), a single mother, and her 12 year old daughter Sara (Luna Mijovic). Set in the present in the seedy Grbavica district of Sarajevo, this film explores the far reaches of trauma in the Bosnian war: how the psychic wounds inflicted in that terrible time remain open and unhealed to this day. The film opens with the camera panning a dark, rich kilim rug behind the front credits, sweeping next over the faces of women lying on the rug, finally to a special face, a sweet, sad woman’s face, her eyes staring painfully straight into our own. Thus, in an instant, before any dialogue, we are engaged with this woman, riveted by her, and she interests us deeply from this first moment.
This sense of intense engagement prevails throughout this well told, well photographed narrative. We feel impelled to care about the reclusive, hesitant Esma, Sara, her saucy, spirited daughter, and the one man in the story, Pelda (Leon Lucev) who - although he is a gun toting thug like all the others we meet in the netherworld of Grbavica - is so much more: a devoted son to his shut-in aging mother and a respectful, tender suitor to Esma. Status among the kids hinges on whether their long dead fathers were sheheens – Bosnian loyalists who fought to the death, or the unspeakable alternative, bastards produced by the systematic rape of Bosnian women captured by the enemy in the Bosnian War, the Chetnik Serbs.
We visit a women’s trauma support group, conducted by the same social worker who also passes out subsistence grants. Esma only attends on the days when grants are issued, and she remains silent even then. But we know she’s disturbed. She startles visibly watching a butcher chop off the head of a fish. Twice at the nightclub where she works she is overcome watching a sexy Ukrainian waitress in an embrace with one of the owner’s thug buddies, and she must run to the bathroom to vomit or cry. Her private, silent avoidance of the painful memories of her own captivity is in the end intruded upon by Sara’s demands to know more about her father, and why it is that Esma cannot produce the customary document certifying that he was in fact a Bosnian soldier killed in action.
This is a bittersweet story, full of love between mother and daughter and silently suffered pain, teen infatuation, life on the mean streets, and, in the end, hope for a better future. Grbavica swept the film awards at the 2006 Berlin IFF: Winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film, Best Peace Film, and Special Ecumenical Jury Award. (In Serbo-Croatian) Grade: A-

http://www.find-bg.com/news_img/images/fliki/Cannes/berlinale/2006/grbavica_poster.jpg

THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS (Isabel Coixet, Spain, 2005, 115 m.). THEME: POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER IN A WOMAN SURVIVOR OF BOSNIAN WAR. SPOILER ALERT! Isabel Coixet’s well crafted narrative screenplay interweaves two subtexts: an intriguing psychodrama about the long lasting wounds of war trauma and a convoluted, slowly building love story of two damaged people brought together by chance on an oil rig in the North Sea. Josef (Tim Robbins), an engineer on the pumping station, has been burned and temporarily blinded while trying in vain to save a coworker from a fiery suicide. Hanna (Sarah Polley), a social recluse who works as an assembly line factory worker in England, has more or less been forced by the HR department to take a month long holiday, to quell the animosity of her fellow workers, who resent her scrupulous punctuality and four year record of never having taken leave for illness or vacation.
A chance conversation in a tavern leads her to volunteer to serve as a nurse to Josef, aboard the oil rig. (Hanna had been trained in and practiced nursing for several years in the past.) The initial encounters between Hanna and Josef are spiced with unpredictable thrust and parry. Josef does the thrusting: mouthing off provocative sexualized comments to Hanna, like a guy coming on at a bar. She in turn remains all but mute; she won’t even tell her name at first. She is diffident toward the rest of the crew as well. Slowly over the next days she lowers her guard, begins to thaw with everyone. In time Hanna shares her story with Josef. Her origins in Sarajevo. Her detention along with other women by their own Bosnian troops, who held her captive for months and systematically raped and mutilated her and the others. She tells Josef that he’s just like those other men, harboring only a lascivious interest in women. She also tells him that a friend of hers was forced to kill her young daughter by shooting her through the vagina, though we suspect that the “friend” was Hanna herself.
This catharsis, possibly her first disclosure to someone other than her therapist (played by Julie Christie) seems to dissipate Hanna’s deep malaise. Josef discloses his own sources of remorse: his affair with a woman married to his closest friend, possibly the same man who had suicided aboard the rig, though we cannot be sure. Josef in time is medivaced for care in a hospital and Hanna returns to the factory. But in the end they find each other in a plausible reconnection that is tender and genuine but devoid of any sentimental pretensions.
A nice sidebar is provided: some glimpses of how men on the rig pass time. They improvise playground swings, play cards, make up song and dance performances, and a few engage in homoerotic encounters. The supporting cast of crew members is very good, led by the chef, Simon (Javier Cámara). All in all this bittersweet production offers a compelling view of the far reaches of the grotesque trauma of war. (In English) Grade: B+

http://www.psychflix.com/reviews_s-z.html#secret_life_words

The Secret Life of Words

Peppermint Candy

PEPPERMINT CANDY (Lee Chang-dong, South Korea, 2001). THEMES: POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER; SUICIDE. Arresting story of the roots of a suicide. An agitated 40 year old man disrupts a reunion of his old friends, then suicides as we watch. Long flashbacks then sequentially review the prior 20 years of his life, the most recent epoch shown first. Gradually the circumstances and personal misconduct leading to the suicide are revealed. Fine performance by Sol Kyung-Gu as the protagonist. (In Korean). Grade: B (02/01)

http://www.psychflix.com/reviews_m-r.html#peppermint_candy

Mrs. Dalloway

MRS. DALLOWAY (Marleen Gorris, Netherlands/UK, 1997). THEMES: PTSD (POST-COMBAT PSYCHOTIC DEPRESSION); WOMEN’S ISSUES. Dear, dear. How disappointing this film is, viewed just after reading Woolf’s novel. The screenplay has erased nearly all the fine edge of Woolf’s incisive characterizations. The men are all less woeful, the women all less strong, and one of the weakest women – Lady Bradshaw - here is as overbearing and menacing as her husband was made out to be in the novel, while Sir William is a sort of pussycat. In this film, it is not Lady Bruton who is closeted with the Prime Minister during Clarissa’s party, but rather it is Richard Dalloway who gets the private audience, on Lady Bruton’s behalf.
The casting isn’t altogether bad. Michael Kitchen could have been quite good as the failed, hopelessly dependent Peter Walsh, but the lines he is given by screenwriter Atkins do not reveal the enormity of his spinelessness. Nor are Richard’s naivete and banal simplicity made clear. Rupert Graves is adequate as the hapless, psychotically depressed Septimus. No problems there. And Lena Headey is fine as the young Sally Seton. But Clarissa’s power and her complexity are missed entirely here, both in her younger and older personas. She’s made out to be a frivolous party animal. Nevertheless, both Natascha McElhone (the younger Clarissa) and Vanessa Redgrave (the older) do non-verbally convey the poise and demeanor of the novel’s Clarissa quite well. In the end, what we have here is “Mrs. Dalloway” lite; it’s a sort of beautifully filmed bore of a movie. In The Hours, we can provisionally accuse Stephen Daldry and David Hare, or their producers, of creeping male chauvinism when they substitute suffering for stamina in their female characters. But Mrs. Dalloway was made by women! What’s their excuse for misrepresenting Woolf’s vision of the strong women in her novel? Grade: B (06/03)

http://www.psychflix.com/reviews_m-r.html#dalloway

Coming Home

COMING HOME (Hal Ashby, US, 1978). THEMES: EFFECTS OF COMBAT AND INJURY ON SURVIVING MILITARY; IMPACT OF WAR ON FAMILY BACK HOME. SPOILER ALERT! The effects of the Vietnam War on combatants and their loved ones are explored in a realistic, intimate fashion in this fine film, which still holds up very well 23 years after it was made. Released the same year as The Deer Hunter, which explored similar issues in a surreal and more abstract manner. Jane Fonda is Sally, the prim middle class wife of Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern), a Marine captain who is ordered into combat in VN. Sally starts to volunteer at the local VA hospital, where she meets Luke Martin (Jon Voight), former star football player in her high school graduating class who, as a sargeant in the Marines in VN, was left a paraplegic by a shrapnel wound. Luke is embittered, volatile, reclusive, never wanting to leave the hospital. Gradually He and Sally fall in love.
Bob returns home after an accidentally self-inflicted gunshot injury and learns of Sally's affair through FBI surveillance information (Luke's activities were tracked after he created an antiwar protest by chaining himself to the gates of a Marine base). Already way out of sorts after his duty tour in country and disappointed that he did not return home a hero, Bob angrily confronts the couple, but ultimately suicides. There is also a compelling side story concerning Sally's friendship with another young woman (Penelope Milford) whose brother (Robert Carradine) is also a patient at the VA, suffering from a psychosis that began in VN. Voight, Fonda, Dern and Milford are all splendid. (Deer Hunter got the best picture Oscar in 1978, but Voight and Fonda won for acting. Too bad the Academy was so moved by spectacle; Coming Home is the better film.) Grade: A (01/02)

http://www.psychflix.com/reviews_a-d.html#coming_home

KEANE (Lodge H. Kerrigan, US, 2004, 100 m.). SPOILER ALERT! THEMES: GRIEF; LOSS; PTSD; REENACTMENT OF TRAUMATIC SITUATION. William Keane (Damian Lewis) is a man haunted by the abduction of his young daughter, apparently whisked away from the Port Authority bus terminal in New York City months ago, never to be seen or heard of again. Keane is a highly disturbed man, living on disability payments. His life orbits around the loss of his daughter. He hangs out at the terminal, looking for a perpetrator he has never seen. He becomes convinced he’s found the right man at one point, and attacks him. Such is the privacy of Keane’s misery that we’re never sure whether this was a mistaken identification, based on some paranoid delusion, whether his daughter was in fact kidnapped, or, for that matter, if he had a daughter. But he does believe all of these things.

http://www.psychflix.com/reviews_e-l.html#keane

Jacob's Ladder

JACOB'S LADDER (Adrian Lyne, US, 1990). THEME: PTSD, AFTER VIETNAM COMBAT; EXCELLENT DEPICTION OF TRAUMATIC COMBAT FLASHBACKS. SPOILER ALERT! Was Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) killed in combat in Vietnam in 1971, air-evaced in time to save him, or was he never in Vietnam at all? Does he now have a PhD and live with his wife and two sons in a swank New York City apartment house? Or is he a lowly postal worker who left his family and took up with Jezebel (Elizabeth Peña), a coworker? Did Gabe, one of his sons, die? Are nightmarish horned creatures chasing him, trying to kill him? Why won’t his old Army buddies talk to him anymore? Was he a subject in a clandestine aggression-enhancing drug experiment run by the government out of Saigon during the war? What scenes in this film represent Jake’s trauma-related flashbacks, drug-related flashbacks, nightmares, psychotic hallucinations, or just plain memories? Or were all the scenes except combat merely reveries as he lay in semi-coma near death? Did a dead Jake return as a ghost? Sheeez. Who knows? After watching this mesmerizing but hopelessly confusing film, I could go on and on building a list of all the questions raised but unanswered in this screenplay from Hell.
So, if you see this movie, don’t trouble yourself too much trying to make sense of it. However, it is worth seeing as a psychflick because it so well dramatizes and portrays one of the cardinal features of PTSD: vivid flashbacks - intense, distressing daytime recollections and nightmares in which the traumatic events are revisited. The best such sequence occurs very close to the beginning of the film, when Jake’s squad, in the jungle near Da Nang, gets stoned and then is attacked. (With Danny Aiello as Louis, Jacob’s talented chiropractor. By the way, the strange script was written by Bruce Joel Rubin, possibly while ripped on psychedelic substances, I should wonder. Mr. Lyne also directed Flashdance, Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal and the 1997 version of Lolita, with Jeremy Irons, among other films.) Grades: drama: B; screenplay: D; portrayal of PTSD flashbacks: A (11/04)

http://www.psychflix.com/reviews_e-l.html#jacobs_ladder

Cold Light

COLD LIGHT (Kaldaljos) (Hilmar Oddsson, Iceland/Norway/UK/Germany, 2004, 93 min.).THEMES: PTSD & AVOIDANT PERSONALITY. Supernatural phenomena and magical realism are prominent in Icelandic folk traditions and in the films we get from that country. A combination of preternatural powers and flashbacks of traumatic events burdens the protagonist in this story, Grimur (Ingvar Eggert Sigurosson), a 30-something man whom we meet as he first enrolls in classes at an art school. He and Linda (Ruth Olafsdottir), one of his art instructors, develop a romantic relationship. When Linda becomes pregnant, Grimur’s torturous flashbacks of an avalanche that killed his family escalate and he pulls away from her, in the manner one commonly sees in so-called “avoidant” personalities: people who were traumatized in close relationships in the past and protect themselves from further loss or injury by steering clear of intimacy (“once burnt, twice shy” goes the old adage). The film is decently constructed and acted, but it moves slowly and fails to evoke much of a gut response despite its poignant themes. (In Icelandic) Grade: B- (02/05)

http://www.psychflix.com/reviews_a-d.html#cold_light

OFF THE GRID: LIFE ON THE MESA (Jeremy & Randy Stulberg, US, 2007, 64 m.). [NOTE: I missed the first 10 minutes of this screening; I saw the last 54 minutes (85%), enough to justify grading the film, in my opinion.] THEMES: ALTERNATIVE LIVING FOR FORMER WAR COMBATANTS WITH PTSD, OTHERS WHO FEEL ALIENATED FROM THE LARGER SOCIETY. On a high plain in New Mexico, some of society's outsiders, mostly military combat veterans and their families, have been drawn to a loosely organized community to live off the grid and away from mainstream America, which they had found insufferable. The film consists largely of segments from interviews with a dozen or so citizens of this encampment (most people live in RVs, some in more permanent structures). Most of the vets – from Vietnam, the first Gulf War, and even a few from the Iraq War – profess intense loyalty to their country but feel that the U.S. culture has failed them.

.
American flags are very much in evidence. People home school their kids. One or more nurses tend to medical issues. Everybody is armed to the teeth. Shooting practice, rather than golf, is the most popular sport around. Some of the wives can’t stand living there, and long separations and divorces have resulted. Other families remain intact and seemingly the better for having moved to the high desert. There is a council of elders – we meet one of them, a white bearded, mandolin playing Vietnam vet – that deliberates on community problems that cannot be worked out among individuals. A pack of erstwhile homeless kids – the “Nowhere” group – moves into the area and begins to steal from others. The elders ponder what to do and decide to send in “the Mamas” – an ad hoc group of women of various ages and stations – to mediate matters. It works. The kids listen up and fly right in return for being allowed to stay on. The arrangement has now held up for a number of years.
.

The community and its citizens are presented in a sympathetic light. It is easy to admire these folks for minimizing their consumption of stuff (the money spent annually by the average family here is about $4 to $5 thousand, and many have government pensions that cover costs). The carbon footprints these people make are enviably tiny. Viewed from another perspective, however, the picture is less idyllic and more disturbing. For one thing, in most cases we taxpayers are subsidizing these folks, enabling them to live lives that center around idleness, music making, lots of pot smoking and booze guzzling, and gunslinging. Perhaps public support is a wise thing, though, when one ponders about how many of these men might have offed somebody by now, or themselves, had they remained in the mainstream. One elder had been educated at Exeter and Princeton. Isn’t his intellectual talent going to waste? Doesn’t the larger culture need the active participation of people who waste less, thus want less? Is it any of our damn business? Grade B (02/08)

http://www.psychflix.com/reviews_m-r.html#off_grid_mesa

Prince of Tides

THE PRINCE OF TIDES (Barbara Streisand, US, 1991) THEMES: PSYCHOTHERAPIST AT WORK; PTSD Dreadful production adapted from the novel, in which Streisand stars as a psychiatrist who ends up in bed with her patient, who suffers from PTSD related to childhood abuse by his father. Grade: D (10/98)

http://www.psychflix.com/reviews_m-r.html#the_prince_of_tides

Brothers

BROTHERS (Brødre) (Susanne Bier, Denmark, 2005, 110m.). SPOILER ALERT! THEMES: SURVIVOR GUILT; PTSD; CHANGES IN FAMILY DYNAMICS RELATED TO WAR. Among all military combatants who suffer psychologically from war-related trauma, those who suffer worst are the ones who survive while their closest buddies died, and those who perpetrate gratuitous violence, acts such as torture, killings unrelated to armed engagement with the enemy, and other desperate acts of self preservation. Susanne Bier’s new film explores this theme in possibly the most poignant manner I have seen on the screen, and that’s not all. She also shows us the severe upheavals wrought within a family, when a loved one, a soldier - first thought to be dead in action but later discovered alive - returns home, forever changed by his experiences.
Michael (Ulrich Thomsen) leads a squad of Danish soldiers deployed to peacekeeping efforts in post-war Afghanistan, leaving behind his wife Sarah (Connie Nielsen, whose beauty runs glowingly deep); two young daughters (played with astonishing realism by Sarah Juel Werner and Rebecca Løgstrup); his misfit kid brother Jannik (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), recently released from prison after robbing a bank and assaulting a female employee, causing her to suffer PTSD symptoms for years afterward; and his parents. Almost immediately, his squad is sent out by helicopter to rescue a lost soldier and is shot down, plummeting into a lake. All aboard are assumed to have died. The family are informed and become absorbed in terrible grief. A funeral is held. Time passes.
These circumstances have a transformative effect on Jannik, moved by the loss of his brother to change his ways, especially by offering aid and comfort to Sarah and his nieces. The relationship is honorably conducted, though Sarah and Jannik have passing moments marked by hugs, and just once by a kiss.

.
Meanwhile, we learn that Michael in fact was the lone survivor of the crash, and hardly scratched at that. He is seized by guerilla warriors and placed in a crude cell, where he discovers the lost soldier, also held captive. Time passes. Michael witnesses another captured soldier’s execution. And then one day he is confronted with the need to make a horrifying choice to save himself. Regarding the outcome of this colossal moral dilemma, I will only say here that when the camp is subsequently liberated by friendly forces, Michael is the only survivor to be rescued and returns home. He tells no one what happened during his captivity.
But Michael is a shaken, changed man. He is out of sorts: morose, irritable, unaffectionate, suspicious and jealous toward Jannik, who has obviously done so much to aid Sarah. Matters only worsen, until Michael smashes up the kitchen that Jannik had finished for Sarah and threatens to kill her and the girls one night in a drunken rage. For this plus menacing the police who respond, he is imprisoned. At the end, Sarah visits Michael and tells him she will never see him again unless he tells her what happened to him in Afghanistan. He curls up in her lap and begins to cry in the film’s final scene.

.
This film is rich in several ways. The role shifts between the brothers are carefully constructed and played out, blacksheep Jannik emerging as the considerate, reliable one, while Michael moves in precisely the opposite direction. The acting, especially the contributions of Ms. Nielsen and the two child actors. The photography emphasizes close-ups of the players, sometimes only an eye that nearly fills the screen, aiding one’s sense of the interiority of their feelings. Ironic tension is skillfully built up while Michael is in Afghanistan by alternating scenes of him with scenes of the grieving family back home. The occasional long shots – gorgeous Afghan sunsets behind distant mountains juxtaposed with shots of Michael in his grim cell; the oily water surface where his helicopter crashed - are powerful.

.
The theme of PTSD (for Michael and for the woman attacked by Jannik, whom we never see) and manifestations of Michael’s survivor guilt are depicted here with impeccable clinical validity. About the woman, we learn that she has had nightmares and insomnia for three years since the attack, and that she is constantly obsessed with fears that Jannik will return to kill her. Michael’s demeanor is excruciatingly similar to many Vietnam veterans, who could not discuss their war experiences, seemed alienated and unable to assimilate, drank too much or used drugs to numb their psychic pain, and all too often were seized with rage that broke apart their families.

.
Such circumstances created a significant source of recurring domestic violence in this country in the 1970s and 80s, when spouses kept coming back despite their war-traumatized husbands’ episodic violence toward them. In this film, Sarah does the right thing at the end by refusing to rejoin her husband until he can somehow sort out the effects of what he did in Afghanistan.This film, like Bier’s 2002 film Open Hearts, another story of suffering and changed relationships in the wake of trauma, is gutwrenching, not a film for everyone, certainly, but one that any professional who works with trauma survivors should see. Grade: B (In Danish) (07/05)

Bringing out the Dead

BRINGING OUT THE DEAD (Martin Scorsese, US, 1999). THEME: POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER. Nasty slice-of-urban-life stuff from Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader, who adapted a novel by Joe Connelly. Nicholas Cage is Frank, a stressed-out New York City ambulance paramedic who is haunted by flashbacks of a woman he once treated but whose life he could not save. The film is full of lurid episodes involving dopers, alcoholics, victims and perpetrators of violence, the mentally ill, and accident victims. John Goodman (whose even worse stress symptoms lead him to quit), Ving Rhames (who drinks to steady himself, as Frank does) and Tom Sizemore (a sadistic fellow who likes to beat up folks they are dispatched to help) play various paramedic partners who team up with Frank. All offer riveting turns, and Patricia Arquette is also quite good as the daughter of a man Frank has brought to the hospital who keeps on having cardiac arrests. Grade: B (02/04)

http://www.psychflix.com/reviews_a-d.html#bringing_dead

Affliction

AFFLICTION (Paul Schrader, US, 1998). THEME: CHRONIC PTSD; EFFECTS OF CHILDHOOD TRAUMA ON SUBSEQUENT PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT. Like another recently filmed Russell Banks' story, The Sweet Hereafter, this film deals with the lasting effects of trauma on the human spirit, but the resemblance between these films ends there. This is a sad tale of how the sins of an abusive father are visited upon his son, who tries to love but becomes lost to rage. James Coburn and Nick Nolte are excellent as the father and son. When Wade (Nolte) says that he "feels like a whipped dog...one of these days I'm gonna bite back" he evokes a coda for the central passion of many adults who were severely mistreated as children. Equally though more subtlely portrayed is the dilemma of Rolf (Willem Dafoe), Wade's younger brother. When Rolf tells Wade he's not afflicted, Wade's ready retort is, "that's what you think." Later Rolf tells of his lasting affliction. "I was a careful child and I continue to be a careful adult," he says. Rolf avoided abuse by stealth, by not permitting himself to respond with any provocation of his alcoholic father. But the price of his indelible, pervasive caution is that in mid-adulthood he still is single, aloof, living an orderly life as a bachelor college professor. He never returned to his hometown, not until his mother's death. Apart from this family psychodrama, the film also features a murder, or was it an accident? Grade: B+ (2003)

http://www.psychflix.com/reviews_a-d.html#affliction

Lucid

Joel Rothman can't sleep. And that's the least of his problems. His wife has left him, his daughter is showing signs of severe mental distress, his boss is out to get him, and every time he gets behind the wheel of his car, his life is at risk. Just when things couldn't get any worse, Joel is assigned three patients suffering extreme symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. As he begins to treat them, and learn their secrets, he starts to unravel the mystery of his own life and to discover the key to getting through to his daughter. Written by Anonymous

Joel Rothman is an insomnia-plagued psychotherapist whose life is unravelling in every direction. His wife has left him and his distressed nine-year-old daughter, he hasn't slept in weeks, and his final three patients are suffering from a dangerous case of post traumatic stress disorder. As his patients' conditions spiral out of control, Joel must unravel the mystery of their connection before he loses his daughter forever. Written by Anonymous

Badland

Murder in the First

Birdy

Taxi Driver

,

,

,

,

Apocalyspe Now

They didn't call them choppers cause they were nice, I can tell you that...
..

Genre: Action Adventure War Drama

.
Starring: Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando

.
Directed By: Francis Ford Coppola

.

Overview: A soldier is sent on a mission to kill a mad rogue Colonel, in war-torn Vietnam.
.

Performance:
Robert Duvall's role is understood as being one of the best of the film, even of any film ever written, and I can't disagree. There was so much truth during the filming (Martin Sheen's drunken mirror smash was 100% real) that the events that took place for these actors made, quite obviously, a tremendous impact on their performance.

.

Cinematography:
One of the highest budgets, endless days of shooting, often with no end in sight, makes for lots and lots of rolls of film. Aerials, explosions, grand panoramas, exciting stunts... This film is an American classic, and part of the reason is certainly the visual aspect. Without perfect cinematography, it would lose some of it's edge, as Deerhunter did.

.

Rating: 10
.

Script:
"Charlie don't Surf!"
.

"Why do you guys sit on your helmets?" "So we don't get our balls blown up."
.

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning. That smell, that gasoline smell... Smells like... Victory."
.

"The Horror... The Horror."
.

What else is there to say?Rating: 10

http://www.filmsquish.com/guts/?q=node/1279

The Deer Hunter

Born of the Fourth of July

The Fisher King

Fearless