What's the worst job in America? Excluding those jobs which cause
physical pain or disgust, it might be the job performed by the soldiers or
sailors who act as "angels of death." Their assignment consists of telling
people that the person they love most is dead. When any member of the
American military dies in action, two others are designated to inform the
next of kin immediately. The messengers must act quickly, because the
soldier's family must be notified directly, before there is any
possibility that they could hear the news from someone else. The military
brass do not want the aggrieved next of kin to hear the somber news from
some neighbors who watch cable news or surf the internet, or even worse,
from some glib member of the local media. The responses to the messengers
encompass every level of grief, from denial to despair to anger at the
army. The messengers can get spit on, threatened, cursed, or even
physically harmed. Even when the process goes as smoothly as possible,
they know that their job is to render people inconsolable with
unimaginable sorrow.
The Messenger - soon to be a breezy musical comedy!
There is some attention paid to the personal history of the two
messengers and the means they use to help them cope with their onerous
duty, but those elements of the film offer no relief from the overall
sense of hopelessness. The senior officer (Woody Harrelson) is a bitter
recovering alcoholic who seems incapable of making true human contact. His
new partner (Ben Foster) is a young enlisted man who is recovering from
battle-shock and, if that were not enough of a burden for him to bear, is
also anguishing over the recent loss of a lifelong girlfriend.
Yup, since this is probably the most sensitive job within the military
ranks, it is naturally entrusted to a redneck alkie who is still a captain
despite obviously being about 50 years old! He in turn selects as his new
partner an uneducated and shell-shocked motor pool sergeant with anger
management issues and only three months left to serve. But the new man's
inexperience is not a barrier to good performance, because the elderly
captain gives him nearly three full minutes of training!
The structure of the film includes relatively little forward movement,
concentrating instead on a series of vignettes in which the two men are
pictured delivering the news to household after household, encountering
different reactions. Many of these visits could be re-sequenced without
affecting the film in any way. Although the film is plagued by inertia and
one-note despondency, its serious themes are the official signal of an
"important" movie, and it has therefore attracted the attention of film
critics (90% positive reviews) and those societies which frequently confer
awards on such grim efforts. Woody Harrelson has been nominated by many
groups, including the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild, to
receive their "best supporting actor" award for his work as the senior
messenger. In fact, the Detroit Film Critics gave Woody two of its five
supporting actor nominations: one for The Messenger and one for his comic
turn in Zombieland. (Neither won, however, as the trophy went to Cristoph
Waltz from Inglourious Basterds.) Harrelson's co-stars in The Messenger,
Samantha Morton and Ben Foster, have attracted some award-season attention
for their own performances, and Steve Buscemi also turned in two
outstanding and emotionally resonant scenes as an aggrieved father.
