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Arts & Culture

Stop-Loss

Stop-Loss is a term Peirce says comes from the financial world but is being used by the military to describe the involuntary extension of a service member's enlistment contract during a time of war in order to retain them or return them to action.

"What it means is that soldiers are being kept beyond their service time," says Peirce who came by the KPBS studios last month, "but if there's a war going on, the president has the right to extend their service. This is technically in the contract; it is in the fine print and 81,000 soldiers have been stop-lossed."

Peirce came to San Diego to present a screening of her film. Before the film showed, a loop of soldier videos that she had assembled played in the theater. During the Q&A, she asked as many questions as she answered since a number of the people in the audience were wounded servicemen who had come home from Iraq and she wanted to know about their experiences and if they thought what she had put on screen felt authentic to them. The members of the group Wounded Warriors that attended the screening applauded her efforts.

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Peirce says she wanted to make a film about why people were signing up for service, what their experience in combat was like, and what's it like coming home. She became fascinated with the Iraq war and the soldier's experience when her own brother signed up. While he was home on leave, Peirce found her brother watching videos made by other soldiers, and it struck her that this was the first time soldiers themselves were documenting their experiences to such a degree.

"As I looked over his shoulder," Peirce recalls, "I saw these were rough images that had been shot on one chip cameras, and the camera was placed on a sandbag or it was wired to a Humvee or even attached to a gun turret. And what you were seeing were images of battle, and images of guys in their barracks. I realized at that moment that this was a view of the war that we had never seen. It was the experience of the soldier unedited, from their point of view and then put to rock music. So in some ways it was like a fantasy of themselves. Some of these videos were extremely patriotic -- set to Toby Keith's music -- and then there were also ones like pure gore. They would go into the streets and see dead bodies and it was about how much body count can we rack up, put to thrill kill music. I was fascinated by these, and I realized that these needed to be in the movie. In many ways the movie needed to be born from these videos."

And it was. Stop-Loss opens with soldier videos, and if Peirce had her way, soldier videos should be playing in the theater as people arrive to set the tone for the film. The film opens in Iraq as Brandon (Ryan Phillippe) and his squad of fellow Texans prepare to go back home. But before they do, they get pulled into a deadly ambush after a car runs their checkpoint.

Opening the film with the characters in Iraq was important for Peirce because it allows audiences to understand what the experience is like. But filming those scenes, says Peirce, "was a challenge because I had to harness this whole big movie machine. I was shooting four cameras, which means you have four different cinematographers and four camera crews, and they're all trained looking at the action from a different point of view. And because it's special effects and explosions, I can't do ten takes. They come in and say, & 'If you are lucky, you can get two takes. But if you can do it in one that would be great.' Yeah that would be great because the clean up time and the reset time are very expensive. So that means I have to be so technically precise to make sure that my actors are right. Generally you do multiple takes because your actor is getting up to speed or your lighting guy is getting ready. Everybody is getting it by take three or four, but I don't have the luxury of doing that. So everybody just has to be on their game."

Peirce says it's also a challenge to keep the energy level high during these difficult set ups: "But it helps that we are using real guns, it helps that we are using real loads, it helps that we are using real uniforms. But still when you are in your close up, you are asking your actors to go into a state of mind that is incredibly tense and so you all really have to be in those circumstances."

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For the characters in the film, coming out of those intense circumstances and going back home can be a difficult transition. Making it even more difficult is to come home, thinking you're done, and then being told you have to go back. When Brandon comes home, he's angered to find that he's been stop-lossed.

In researching the film, Peirce says, "Pretty much every soldier I have talked to is frustrated by stop-loss because it's in the fine print and because who wants to go back after you have done your service. So some of them just accept it and go back. They are angry, and their wives and families are very angry about it. Some fight the system. They go to their chaplain and say 'I'm really having a problem with this.' But every story I've heard about this, the chaplain basically says go back to war. They go to their CO's but they don't really have much to tell them because there's no way the military can condone them getting out. The next step for some is to actually try to fight a law suit. There are eight soldiers that I know of who banded together to file a law suit because their argument is we're not technically in a time of war. So we are being kept in unfairly. The courts won't hear the lawsuits. And there are some people who have gone on the run, they are AWOL in America up to 11,000 now. And finally there are people who have left the country."

Stop-Loss tries to address all those responses, and in some ways it's too much to try and cover in one film. Brandon, who has never questioned the war or questioned his duty to serve, reacts with anger. He calls it a "back door draft." But he feels that if he can just talk to the right person -- a CO, a senator -- this can all be fixed. His mom just wants to take him to Mexico. Meanwhile, his buddy Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) wants nothing more than to go back but after a few drunken outburts, the military's not interested.

What may surprise people is that in many ways the film avoids politics. Peirce focuses on a group of young men who do not question the war, who come from families with service histories, and who feel duty bound to sign up and serve. So at no point does the film really take on the issue of the war itself or whether or not the Bush Administration has made mistakes. That lack of criticism may frustrate some who may expect Peirce to take a more liberal stance. But Peirce, whose own brother volunteered, seems to be working through different issues. She seems consumed with the trying to figure out why someone like her brother would enlist and what serving in Iraq is like for these young men and women. Her film does get to some of these issues, and she does get inside the head of a few of these soldiers. The jolt of going from the intensity of being in combat to coming home is well conveyed. She also gets to what might make these soldiers go back. For the characters in her film, the most difficult adjustment proves to be living with the fact that one of their squad died and none of them could prevent that. That, more than anything else, is what haunts Brandon.

But in trying to cover all the material she wants, Peirce has to contrive a plot that allows for all the members of the squad to be from the same town and to return home together with each soldier representing a different problem in adjusting. Then Brandon has to progress through each of the different stages of response to being stop-lossed, and then he has too cross paths with an AWOL soldier who can give us a bleak report of what that choice is like.

Plus, the film suffers from the fact that the pouty Ryan Phillippe isn't really up to the complex emotions Peirce would like Brandon to convey. If Gordon-Levitt (who has moved from TV's Third Rock From the Sun to stellar performances in Mysterious Skin and The Lookout ) had been moved up from his supporting role to the lead, the film would improve considerably. But Phillippe doesn't have the depth. He is fine in films like Igby Goes Down where he plays a rich, self-absorbed spoiled brat, but in Stop-Loss, he can't even make me buy his Texas accent. With his cowboy boots and hat, he simply looks like a male model posing for a photo shoot to sell Texas beer. On the other hand, Aussie Abbie Cornish, as one of the girlfriends waiting for her soldier to come home, is completely convincing. Even Step Up's Channing Tatum fares better than Phillippe. Peirce, whose casting choices were so dead on in Boys Don't Cry, just misses an opportunity for a better film with Phillippe in the lead.

In screening the film around the country, Peirce has been moved by the soldiers who have attended and told her that she's gotten it right. She's also been moved by their individual stories and has wanted to "continue the narrative" beyond the film. To do that she and Paramount's "interactive" department (that's how they refer to the web) have partnered to get cameras into the hands of soldiers and then to post their videos online as part of the movie's web site. You can find the soldiers' videos at www.stoplossmovie.com/SoundOff.

Stop-Loss (rated R for graphic violence and pervasive language) takes an unexpected perspective on the war and raises issues worth considering. But it doesn't deliver the emotional impact or vivid drama that made Peirce's debut so riveting. Boys Don't Cry felt like a pesonal and passionate indie film; Stop-Loss feels like a well-crafted Hollywood movie.

Companion viewing: Fighting for Life, Coming Home, Best Years of Our Lives, Boys Don't Cry