Loving the Messenger

I work in the film industry.

It feels strange to write that down. I’m 35 years old and what I’ve really always wanted to do was make movies. I was the kid who memorized the listings in the TV guide and could tell my mom’s friends exactly what would be on every channel every night. I was the kid who stayed up late at night when I was 14 reading Pauline Kael anthologies. I was the kid who obsessively listed the top 10 Woody Allen films in his journal, changing the order every few months, experimenting with putting Zelig ahead of Purple Rose of Cairo and wondering if Annie Hall would always be number 1? (The answer, of course, is yes).

 But that kid became a man who didn’t make movies. That kid became a man who wrote press releases and then managed people who wrote press releases and spent years trying to convince himself that there was something beautiful and universal about video compression technology or semiconductor equipment manufacturing and it was enough just to love movies, to eat them and breathe them and dream them but to go to work all day and do something else.

 And then one day my friend, who unlike me had the courage to do what he loved a long time ago, invited me in. He said: just stop doing that. Come up here and make movies, with me. Like Peter Pan at my bedroom window: you don’t have to grow up. You never did, who are you kidding? I have some faerie dust, let’s go get Captain Hook. And I said yes.

So, now, I work in the film industry, seven months and counting. And I pinch myself when I wake up every morning and get in my car and drive for 2 hours and am still kind of amazed when I get here and find out that we’re still in Neverland.

My friend, Peter Pan, produced a movie recently called The Messenger, before I got here, when he was at a different company. I knew about the movie when he was making it, I heard the stories and understood what he was trying to do and rooted him on, from afar. I never read the script but I understood the context of the movie from my secondhand exposure to his world, which is now kind of my world too. And now the movie is here, done, finished, ready to be presented to the universe. And I just watched it.

 So maybe that’s all a way of saying that I may not be the most reliable narrator when it comes to describing this movie, if that’s what you’re after. I am probably not, strictly speaking, objective. But I am a guy who knows how to watch movies, and that’s the only way I can think of myself, even now. And I just saw a beautiful fucking movie.

The Messenger is about Casualty Notification Officers, which means the U.S. Army officers who have the unenviable job of informing loved ones when a soldier has been killed in combat. Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson play the two officers, and Samantha Morton plays a widow with whom the Ben Foster character makes a strong and unexpected connection.

The first thing to say about The Messenger is that it is a Great Movie. Let’s just get that the fuck out of the way so I can breathe a little. It is in there, now, in my consciousness, it is part of my cinematic memory, part of the language I will forever use to describe what is possible in the medium. It’s in the canon. That’s the level on which this movie demands to be discussed and evaluated.

 There is a quality that runs through all the movies I really love that I’ve never been quite able to exactly name. Sometimes I think it’s empathy, or compassion, but it’s more than that—empathy and compassion are products of it, but it’s something specific to the medium. The movies I love understand the power of the camera to put us inside a moment, and they take that power very seriously. Which means that every moment they offer is worth being inside of, if that makes any sense. Great movies drip with authenticity, even if those movies are fantasies, even if the worlds are invented and unreal. They capture a moment in movement, and by doing so elevate it to a kind of observed and therefore ever-so-slightly heightened reality, in which we recognize our world for what it is: complicated, intoxicating, brutal, beautiful, frightening, heartbreaking, holy.

That’s what The Messenger does, in what feels like a million different ways. I know that when people see this movie they will talk first about the acting, about Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson and Samantha Morton and Steve Buscemi and Jena Malone. And they will be right to do that, because the acting is extraordinary. And they will talk about the subject matter, of course, there will be a dialogue about how this is or isn’t a “war” film, and there will surely be an appreciation and analysis of the way the movie treats a very specific kind of grief and honor and survival. And that’s all there, too, and worthy of discussion. And the writing, the line the script so deftly walks when portraying scenes of unadulterated pain and grief, scenes where one false word would take you out of the film altogether and never let you back in, the pitch-perfect tone of the dialogue throughout the whole film. That’s there, too, and again it should be recognized.

But what I find extraordinary above all else about this film is the way it succeeds in creating an undeniable reality in which these scenes play out, in which these lives are lived. This is truly a movie that locates the universal in the specific, which I offer as the highest kind of praise. It’s an instinct we recognize from religion, I think, and of course from Art—a way of finding unity in the particularity of experience.

That particularity comes from the acting and the writing and the directing and the power of the content, but it also comes from what we’re shown and what we hear. When I think about the movie now I think about the sound of AM radios in cars bleeding into the half-heard music coming from inside a house as the car pulls up, the sound of children playing the way children actually play, the image of a little boy taking a yellow ribbon off a tree, the sight of a lone piano bench on a lawn next to a moving truck.

What all of that adds up to is a movie that breathes and sweats and laughs, a movie that is alive and asserting itself in front of you. And that can be uncomfortable, because we’ve grown used to thinking of movies as things that sit apart from our experience, things in which we escape. This movie offers no escape. It offers something much better, in my estimation: it offers an invitation. It offers a way in. This movie is a knock on the door.

Which is to say: the experience of this movie is inseparable from its subject matter. The Messenger is about a lot of things, on the surface. It’s about grief and survival and friendship and honor and kindness and redemption. It is unexpectedly funny and warm and intensely emotional and gripping at the same time. It is a movie about damaged people who have to deliver the worse news possible to other human beings, and it’s about what those people do to survive and how kindness and love are choices that anyone can make, at anytime, and it’s about how those choices are made, how we get to them, in very specific ways. It’s a movie about acts of courage and heroism on sunny summer days standing at clotheslines and sitting on fishing boats and drinking in neighborhood bars.

In other words, it’s a movie about how we live our lives, all of us, all of us who have experienced trauma and grief and sadness and taken solace in laughter and love and music and friendship, all of us who worry about how we will raise our children and help our friends and find meaning in our own lives. And in this sense it is an intensely optimistic movie.

 The title of this movie describes the main characters, of course, sets out for us what their jobs are in a stark and declarative way. But the title is also something larger than that, it is a description of a role that all the characters serve for each other to one degree or another, and it is a role that, at the risk of sounding too precious about it, we all play every day. We are all messengers, after all, and what matters is the message we bring. So implicit in the title is also a question: what message does The Messenger bring? The answer, I think, is a simple one, but one we all need to hear right now: Choose love. See it through. Feel the pain, keep your eyes open, see it through. And choose love.