RETURN
Written and Directed by: Liza Johnson
Starring: Linda Cardellini, Michael Shannon, John Slattery, and Talia Balsam
Coming off of year filled with such stirring and stunning female performances, the bar for remarkable leading ladies has once again been raised. So what better way to showcase this than for a film to combine a strong female lead with an incredibly relevant wartime story packing an emotional wallop? THE HURT LOCKER and BROTHERS have tackled the hot topic of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from the male soldiers’ perspective, but we’ve never seen a story set about what it’s like for the returning female soldiers. And with modern military women serving in front-line combat roles, it’s about damn time we start telling their stories – and not just on Lifetime TV. RETURN looks to be that trailblazer. Unfortunately for viewers, the film lacks the finesse needed to take the material from ordinary to extraordinary. It starts and ends on strong notes, but the middle is a bit of a whimper.
Kelli (Linda Cardellini) has just arrived home from a military tour of duty overseas. Her plumber-for-hire husband Mike (played by the always fabulous Michael Shannon) and their two young daughters are there at the airport to greet her, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. And that’s not all, as she’s given a warm welcome home by her supportive friends and co-workers. The world is now full of wonderful posibillities, and she’s feeling a certain sense of freedom she’s never felt before! Well, that is until her anxiety about the futility of life begins to overwhelm her, slowly creeping into her forever changed world. She spirals out of control into a series of bad (and frankly too stupid to be believed) decisions and coping mechanisms. How will this end for our heroine? Is she capable of finding happiness again or will she succumb to her PTSD?
While I loved writer-director Liza Johnson’s unique concept of female wartime PTSD and how that crisis plays out against the backdrop of the everyday, the story unfortunately falls flat in execution. Kelli’s decent into her severe anxiety disorder is incredibly slow to develop and does so in an almost-too-subtle fashion. This might be mostly the fault of the script, but also with the lead herself. While talented, Cardellini (who is mostly well known for her work in comedy) is a bit in over her head with the complexities of her character’s change. Audiences will probably also have a hard believing that Shannon and Cardellini are a married couple as there’s little to no tangible chemistry that compels audiences to root for them. She actually sizzles more with co-star John Slattery, who plays a veteran she meets during a court-mandated stint in rehab. Sadly, that brief romance doesn’t really go anywhere. Perhaps the most maddening quality about RETURN is that it falls prey to some very heavy-handed indie filmmaking pretentiousness – both literally and figuritively wandering aimlessly throughout much of act two. We are shown countless shots of boarded-up and vacant businesses in this dead end town – so many that we too feel like we are headed down a dead end. And don’t even get me started on Kelli literally painting over her problems.
What I did find undeniably forceful is how RETURN is bookended. We return (Haha! Get it?) to the same physical location as the opening, but the mood and the person who’s there provide a jarring juxtaposition. It’s a clever techinque, and it’s incredibly poignant and powerful. Even though the film wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, what I hope it will do is push the issue of female PTSD and its affect on military families to the forefront.
RETURN opens in Los Angeles (at Laemmle’s Monica 4) and New York (at Downing Film Center and Village East Cinema) on February 10.
