A Return to the 'Home of the Brave,' Where Soldiers Fight a New Enemy

The heaviness of war hangs everywhere in "Home of the Brave," from director Irwin Winkler. But then Winkler has never been known for his light touch. He got into the biz as a moneyman, raising bucks all those years ago for Elvis movies, and slid into producing. ( He got a Best Picture nod for Sylvester Stallone's "Rocky.") After a while though, he tired of producing (even great movies like "Raging Bull" and "GoodFellas"), so he segued into directing. The conventional line: He was a rich guy who acquired clout and decided to indulge himself directing, rather than merely producing.

But it so happens that his coarseness of touch and maybe even his old-guy grumpiness (he's 75) are just right for "Home of the Brave," a sort of updating of the great soldiers' homecoming flick "Best Years of Our Lives," but with M-16s. In the first place, Winkler remembers that movie (he was 15 when it came out in 1946), and in the second, he values it. His variation, like the original, charts the difficulties of a group of GIs reintegrating in civilian life after the dead friends, the grievous wounds, the combat mistakes, the M.A.S.H. operating tents full of screaming, shattered boys they've seen. You probably wouldn't want too delicate a movie about all this.

The movie is thus old-fashioned in the most clear-cut meaning of that phrase: chronological narration, starting now, ending six months later, charting ups and downs, screams and laughs, failures and successes. Clearly it follows the model of William Wyler's "Best Years," which also featured soldiers returning to a small city far from the cosmopolitan centers, as they tried to put what they'd been through behind them, find a place in the pecking order, and just get on with it.

The first difference, of course, is minor and sociological: Wyler focused on three men, Winkler three men and a woman. The second is major: Wyler's three were returning from a victorious war. They'd done their mission, buried the rat in an alley behind the Berghof or taken the mad aristo with Nanking's blood on his hands for a long ride on a short rope. The four GIs of "Home of the Brave" don't have a victory to assuage their fatigue and melancholy. In fact, they return to an America caught in the debate over what's happening over there, whether it will ever be over over there and if and when it is over over there, was it worth it? Not a pretty picture.

The town is Spokane, Wash., but before we get there we get a hell's-eye tour of one very hot day outside Baghdad. A medical convoy, escorted by two Humvees full of paratroopers, runs into an ambush. As these things go, it's well done: The explosions seem to come from nowhere, the opponents are shadows in doorways or alleys, who vanish as they are discovered. One of the soldiers had a hand blown off and we see the naked, spurting thing, particularly as she -- yeah, she, shades of Jessica Lynch -- sits in shock next to the sergeant who caught the full force of the IED and whose guts she now wears on her face.

Meanwhile, the paratroopers fan out to bring fire on the enemy. No surprise, they are young, brave and cannot imagine their own deaths. They dart after the insurgents in the deadly 3-D game of whack-a-mole played out in the matrix of a mud city, aware every moment that these moles whack back. One drops a figure who turns out to be a woman; another, wounded, falls behind his best friend and when he gets to him, discovers him shot from behind, dying in a dirty alley of a hot town in the middle of nowhere. The oldest of them, a doctor, tries to save the life of the bleeding young woman.

Cut to: here, now. Spokane. Life, as the Reader's Digest might put it, as lived here in these United States.

The surgeon, Will Marsh (Samuel L. Jackson), is a proud man, probably the strongest of them, with a solid family and career to fit into. Why is he having nightmares when he sleeps -- that is, on the rare nights when he can sleep? Why is he drinking like a fish? Why does his son hate him? Why is his wife -- who's survived her own 18 months of hell -- so uninterested in the war?

Then there's the young woman, Vanessa Price (Jessica Biel). Turns out she's a jock, with a jump shot that got her a college scholarship and a promising job as a PE instructor. But how can you shoot a jumper without a hand? And how can you warm to the touch of a boyfriend who knows nothing abut what happened that very hot day? And how about the moment when your child first sees the naked stump, unvarnished by the rubber prosthesis?

Then there's the paratrooper, Tommy Yates (Brian Presley). The macho, butt-kicking son of a beefy cop, he hasn't felt so macho since a buddy died in his arms. His father is worried that he's turning into a wuss and has no time for him; the old guy doesn't understand why the kid doesn't join the same police department he served in. Why is he an usher in a cheesy multiplex? Why does he just drive around after getting off work?

Finally there's the least successful character, short-shrifted by the movie, Jamal Aiken (Curtis Jackson, a.k.a. 50 Cent), who accidentally blew away the woman in the burqa who may or may not have been a suicide bomber. He's the one who's got it the hardest and has the most difficulty in getting it back together.

Alas, Jackson isn't a great actor, which may be why the film loses interest in him, and he's stereotypically represented in its worst and most unnecessary sequence. But both Biel and Presley are good, expressing the pain of their experience without overdoing the histrionics.

As for Samuel L. Jackson, he's such an icon by this time that it's almost hard to say: He's instantly, totally believable, but as Samuel L. Jackson, not Will Marsh.

I must say the best thing about the movie is that it's interested in the soldiers, not the self-serving popinjays and blowhards of left and right who seem to think the war is a big fat career-enhancing photo opportunity. We get enough of them every night. The people who got shot at deserve most of the attention.

Home of the Brave (105 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for violence and language.