Kimberly Peirce finds boys who cry

Los Angeles Times - CA, USA - IT is difficult to separate writer-director Kimberly Peirce's new film, "Stop-Loss," from a joke host Jon Stewart made in his monologue at the Oscars. Noting the poor box office performances in 2007 of Iraq-war-related films like "Redacted," "Rendition" and "In the Valley of Elah," Stewart issued a tongue-in-cheek, President Bush-like call for a surge of war movies.

"Withdrawing the Iraq movies would only embolden the audience," he deadpanned. "We cannot let the audience win."

He has a point. Hollywood's concerted if doomed attempts to meet the country's state of mind have yet to yield a coherent movie experience. Peirce would say that "Stop-Loss" is different, because it's not about the politics of the war, it's about the troops -- the culture of buddies -- who served and continue to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of them was her brother, Brett, who enlisted in the Army at 18 and served in Iraq as part of the 10th Mountain Division of the 82nd Airborne, between 2003 and 2004.

'Seminal questions'

ON a recent Satur- day, Peirce, 40, was perched on a window seat overlooking the ocean in her Malibu one-bedroom apartment, which doubles as her office. She is small and energetic, conversational and without airs. "Boys Don't Cry" began as her MFA project at Columbia and ended with studio deals for her and starring roles for first-time Oscar-winner Hilary Swank.

Swank has appeared in 13 feature films since "Boys Don't Cry"; Peirce, with "Stop-Loss," has now made two. If it's a false comparison -- an actor doesn't come aboard a movie until after a writer has penned a script and a producer has hired a director -- it nevertheless speaks to Peirce's prolonged absence from the ongoing cultural conversation that are movies.

"I look back and it's like 'Boys' asked me and asked my culture some of the seminal questions that I will ask in my life," said Peirce, who is gay. "Same thing in this. My baby brother, who I brought home from the hospital and who represented pure innocence, was taught to be a soldier and to kill."

She has always been fascinated by masculinity and the working-class culture of fighting and drinking in which she said her father was raised. Peirce's mother was 15 and her father 16 when she was born in Harrisburg, Pa.; she shuttled around, subsequently, among relatives and locales, including Florida, Puerto Rico and New York.

"Boys Don't Cry" was the real-life story of Teena Brandon (a.k.a. Brandon Teena), the Nebraska teenager who played with the boundaries of gender by posing as a male, naively walking the razor's edge of sexual politics until it cost her her life. The film was violent, raw and nerve-wracking, but also elegiac and even beautiful, depicting the isolation of small-town Nebraska and the desperate, highly charged deceptions of its main character.

"Stop-Loss" has a different chemistry to it. The violence emanates from the alpha males, but it's more mournful. Star quarterbacks and homecoming kings, they come back from war alien to themselves, to say nothing of the civilians welcoming them. What eases the transition, mostly, is alcohol and watching videos of themselves in Iraq. All are suffering some form of post-traumatic stress.

It was Brett, she said, who first brought her attention to the controversial policy of the movie's title, which refers to a provision whereby troops can be compelled to go back for a second or third tour of duty even though they've completed their enlistments and want to return to civilian life. Title cards at the end of her film refer to estimates that 81,000 American troops have been stop-lossed since military operations began in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This is what happens to Army Staff Sgt. Brandon King ( Ryan Phillippe), a square-up soldier from a military family in Texas who returns to a hero's welcome -- and then an order to redeploy at the end of the month. We have already seen him lead his men through a harrowing ambush in Tikrit, taking casualties. Brandon's decision to go AWOL rather than redeploy (his options come down to war, jail or living out of the country under an assumed identity) drives the story.

The film, Peirce's first since her debut, "Boys Don't Cry," burst from the indie scene in 1999, is destined to be digested as political and antiwar, no matter how much she argues that her real subject is the culture of guys fighting this war. Interviewing troops, Peirce was struck not by their political stance but by their reluctance to return to a place where they couldn't prevent their comrades from being routinely injured, maimed and even killed.

"There's not a single character who says, 'I don't love my country,' " she argued. "The most profound realization I had was, they sign up for patriotic reasons, almost every soldier I talked to said, 'But when you're over there none of that matters. It's all about your buddies.' And you're like, well that's a cliché, but then it's not."

As for her own feelings, Peirce said demurely: "I questioned whether the Iraq war was going to make America safer."