Much has been written about Oren Moverman’s film The Messenger. However, even with its two Oscar nominations (best supporting actor and best original screenplay, 2010) The Messenger seems yet to have really breached the mainstream. I am hoping that the release of the DVD and Blu-Ray editions of the film will expose this poetic and wonderfully shot film to a wider audience. It deserves to be seen.

The film follows Army Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) a 26 year old Iraq war veteran who, after being wounded on the battlefield, reluctantly becomes part of a causality notification team. Will acts as the audience’s view into the sacred yet emotionally exhausting life of Army Casualty Notification Officers (C.N.O.’s). Teaching Will the rules of his new profession is Army Captain Anthony ‘Tony’ Stone (Woody Harrelson). Tony is a smoldering desert storm vet whose is just barely surviving the compassion fatigue of being a C.N.O. by developing a cryptic sense of gallows humor and by consciously distancing himself from the deceased soldier’s Next Of Kin (aka, the N.O.K.). The Messenger follows Will and Tony as they undertake a series of road trips to notify various families that someone they love has died in combat. Between these trips, Tony's character is used as a megaphone to express different thoughts regarding the way our society validates the costs of war while Will, who is still mentally and physically healing from the unnamed trauma he experienced in Iraq, attempts to re-connect to himself and the culture he is now alien to. Drawing its inspiration from American films of the 1970’s (such as The Last Detail or Scarecrow, both made in 1973, or Taxi Driver, 1976), The Messenger features extremely contemplative cinematography and is highly socially relevant.

Many of the interactions between the film's characters are conveyed through subtle exchange of looks instead of extravagantly unrealistic monologues. Every scene that features Will and Tony essentially destroying a family with the knowledge that their child or loved one has died on a battlefield over-seas is shot in such way that the camera lingers on its subjects, almost as if it were afraid to look away from some awkward truth that’s revealed in the act of destruction. Unlike 2009’s Taking Chance, the only other narrative film in existence (thus far) to directly take on the harsh subject matter of how our current society/culture is processing soldiers killed in the Middle East, co-writer/director Oren Moverman aims less to highlight the ritualistic ways in which our country cares for its fallen soldiers and more to validate the secret struggles of returning veterans whose “Mission,” is performing said rituals.

This struggle is most present in the scene in which Will and Tony drunkenly play fight with imaginary guns in a parking lot. Two grown men, both broken in different ways by war, by death, by the directions their lives have taken and the dissonance they feel from the world around them, connecting. Ironically this connection is made by playing war and acting out the personas of the binary (straight-up good or evil) soldiers they grew up thinking they’d be. After years of acting as a C.N.O. and performing countless deceased notifications, the character Tony even goes so far as to play dead. In doing so probing his curiosity of the very force that he works with, thinks about, and (in several representative ways) doles out everyday.

I attribute The Messenger’s inability to have reached the cover of ‘Entertainment Weekly’ and lack of Oscars to this preconceived notion that it exists as simply as some kind of patriotic tearjerker. Or even worse - that The Messenger is simply a pretentious independent film’s attempt to commodity the deaths of U.S. soldiers. Which is tragic! The Messenger challenges the viewer to acknowledge death, and the fact that people die everyday in wars, and that somebody, in some system, has to tell their relatives. In doing so, The Messenger is on par with, if not braver than, The Hurt Locker and is definitely one of the two best films that has come out since 2007’s There Will Be Blood. If you enjoy such films as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Taking Chance, or any of the other films I’ve mentioned in this article, I very strongly suggest going out and purchasing the Blu-Ray or DVD special edition of The Messenger. Both come with fascinating extras including audio commentary with Moverman, Foster, and Harrelson, and a brief documentary about U.S. Army Casualty Notification Officers.