(2009) Pretty much everybody can say, "I support the troops." One of them, returning home from Iraq to Fort Dix, NJ, after recovering from wounds suffered in Iraq from an IED, SSgt Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) silently harbors a horrible guilt.

From Kelly (Jena Malone), a former girlfriend to whom he denied commitment before he left for the theater of war, he accepts a bunch of flowers and her straddling him in bed; she's soon to be engaged to Alan. What's next, she asks him: bachelorhood, college, job?

With three months remaining of active duty, Will reports to Col Stuart Dorsett who assigns him (a model soldier and decorated "goddamn hero") to the casualty-notification team, emphasizing this sacred duty as a priority ("This job is about character"), partnered with Capt Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson).

"Are you a head case?" Capt Stone demands to know of Will. He then sternly explains their mission: when addressing the NOK (next of kin), never anyone else, stick to the script - no extraneous comments or euphemisms, say only "killed or dead" - and permit no touching or hugging the NOK; keep the beeper close at all times because within 24 hours of positive ID, the casualty-notification team must be first to inform the NOK ahead of the media or someone else making contact by cellphone or otherwise.

On their way to their first contact together, Capt Stone advises not parking too close, cautioning that some have guns, and to say only "morning" or "afternoon" because there's "nothing good about it." When a young, African-American woman, obviously pregnant, answers Capt Stone's knocking, he asks for Mrs Burrell, whom he's told is next door visiting. As the two men wait for the mother of the dead soldier to return home, the girl, saying she and the young man were going to get married, pleads with them: "Please, just tell me."

As Capt Stone turns to leave, remarking, "We'll be back," Mrs Burrell appears. "The Secretary of the Army extends his deepest sympathy …" The soldier's mother, wailing and screaming with the girl, slaps Capt Stone. "No such thing as a satisfied customer," he quips sardonically to the sergeant as they walk away from the house.

Off duty Tony and Will get better acquainted; the older soldier, three years sober with AA and thrice married (twice to the same woman), had been to Iraq more than a decade earlier during Operation Desert Storm (their different experiences will lead to later antagonisms), opines that every funeral should be televised for Americans to see the consequences of going to war. Learning of Will's personal history, Tony sums him up: "Another lost child looking for a family."

Will volunteers to take the lead on their next visitation. Dale Martin, the father of a 20-year-old boy, says to SSgt Montgomery, "Look at that tree … same age as my son," and then spits into Will's face, screaming angrily and hurling objects at them: "Why aren't you there? Why aren't you dead?"

They intrude into people's lives without knowing anything about them, Will observes; to a physician examining his damaged eye he remarks: "Can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again." Passing a school with children watching them on their way to deliver unglad tidings to Mrs Olivia Pitterson (Samantha Morton) that her husband was killed yesterday, Capt Stone comments drily to Will: "Could be worse. Could be Christmas." She takes the news without hysterics: "Goodbye. I know this can't be easy for you."

Observing her hanging a man's shirt on the clothesline, "That's a first," Tony remarks when they're out of earshot: "She's bangin' someone." Following a chance encounter at a mall, Will takes a personal interest in Olivia and her mixed-race son Matt; he repairs her vehicle, recommending a new transmission. When Stone learns of Will's involvement, he chides the NCO: "Where are your morals?"

Needing Will's company and friendship, Tony gets Will (trying to divert attention from Kelly and Olivia) to go out with him and two girls, Claire and Lara. Another visit brings them to the home of a girl residing with her father whom she hadn't yet told she'd married a soldier; a translator accompanies them to repeat Capt Stone's message in Spanish for a soldier's father.

"I missed the man he was a long time ago," Olivia says to Will of her husband, who had not treated her and Matt well when at home with them: "Now that he's dead, I love him again." Reacting to Capt Stone's harsh criticism after Will's touching an older woman when she and her husband nearly collapsed from hearing of their son's death, Will retorts to his superior: "Fuck procedure! They're just people. They're not like you."

Later, trying to make it up to his buddy by getting away with the girls to a lake resort for some R&R, Tony ("The Army owns me and that's fine with me") analyzes the differences of the wars in Vietnam, Bosnia, and Iraq: in this war, because of the religion, "nobody's getting laid." Crashing Kelly's engagement party, an inebriated Will offers the couple a toast from the Secretary of the Army.

I can admire from afar (having been raised in a military family) the devotion to duty, the willingness to subordinate self to a larger conception of country required of members of the armed forces. Appearing suddenly on a doorstep, stiff and stoical in uniform, simultaneously recognizable and unwanted, like angels of death - foreign, distant, untouchable - the military's messengers deliver grief through their cold, impersonal, formal announcement. All at once a consequence of war (for which the recipient unlike the soldier received no training to anticipate) explodes like an IED in the face of an innocent civilian (collateral damage), maiming another life forever. The messengers, themselves walking wounded, await orders for their next victim.

Oren Moverman directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Alessandro Camon.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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