Back to the front lines

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.

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 cliche, 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.”

‘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.

Phillippe’s character, Brandon, is experiencing flashbacks from a house-to-house firefight, but by the time he gets stop-lossed he’s established as the stable one among his buddies Steve (Channing Tatum) and Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), both of whom float around in a haze of aggression and alienation, with the suggestion of undiagnosed brain injuries.

“Her priority is always with the actors,” Gordon-Levitt said of Peirce. “She’s an extremely sharp, perceptive observer of humanity. We talked about stuff that’s not even in the movie. It’s there implicitly. . . . That’s the rehearsal process [with her], and that’s so inspiring and encouraging and frankly rare.”

Brandon’s going AWOL is as transgressive, in its way, as Brandon Teena trying to pass herself off as a boy. The message is unmistakable; these young guys, from military towns like this one in Texas, are being redeployed like punch-drunk fighters being sent back into the ring for Round 12.

What captivated executives at MTV Films, Peirce said, was the potential youth cross-over of the soldier videos she inhaled as her research. “They go back to their barracks, and they cut on iMovie,” she marveled of the videos. “And also they’re so savvy, they’re pulling images off the Internet of Boeing, and like, you know, planes taking off and planes landing.

“The movie was born out of these hand-held videos that were cut to rock music and patriotic music that I was seeing,” Peirce said of this generation at war. “Because . . . we’ve never been this close to this experience.”

Box office is secondary

Peirce was back off the road, in the midst of a 22-city screening tour of her new movie, many of the dates at or sponsored by colleges. She seemed unperturbed about the climate in which her movie is arriving or, more likely, indifferent to the marketplace. Indeed, Peirce and the marketplace are only casual acquaintances. Though she was given a series of first-look development deals by Michael De Luca, when he was an executive at New Line Cinema and when he was at DreamWorks, the deals did not produce films.

“I think women are probably not as driven to just turn out the numbers,” Peirce said, when asked why she hasn’t made more films. “It’s a weird thing. Look, I want to make a lot, but I want to love them, because they’re a part of me, you know?”

“You talk to any director,” she added later, “it’s tough. It’s tough to make movies that you love.”

She spent years developing “Silent Star,” about one of early Hollywood’s infamous scandals, the murder of silent film director and actor William Desmond Taylor. By the end of 2003, Peirce said, she had the film cast with Annette Bening, Hugh Jackman and Ben Kingsley, only to balk when the studio asked her to make a $30-million movie for $20 million.

Her agent, Peirce concedes, thought she ought to have directed 2005’s “Memoirs of a Geisha” after she was interviewed. But Peirce, who has Japanese relatives by her mother’s second marriage and has lived in Japan, didn’t want to produce a PG-13 film about an underage prostitute.

“Stop-Loss” was written on spec, Peirce working with co-writer Mark Richard. When they started, Richard said, the movie “Jarhead” was on the horizon. Author of the novel “Fishboy,” Richard had met Peirce through actress Charlize Theron, whose production company at one point held the film rights to Richard’s short story “The Ice at the Bottom of the World.”

“Kim and I come from opposite ends of the political spectrum,” Richard said. “I’m a conservative and she’s a liberal. We agree to disagree, but one thing we won’t step down from is: Keep the drama honest.”

Richard said he saw “Stop-Loss” in the context of “Coming Home”; Peirce was thinking about “The Deer Hunter” and “The Best Years of Our Lives.” Then, Peirce said, “I watched ‘The Last Detail,’ ” referring to the 1973 Hal Ashby film about two Navy men giving a newbie some life experience while escorting him to the brig. “And I sat down and I was like, ‘We’re making a $6-million movie. That’s it.’ I mean, of course . . . this became much bigger, but it was with that attitude. I was just like, OK, I can like totally regret the lost years, cause I lost a lot of time.”

Years passed developing “Stop-Loss” too, but here Peirce was doing what seems integral to her filmmaking -- what she calls “cultural anthropology.” She needed to research, to watch soldier videos, attend their homecomings, talk to them. So she could convey, without pity or polemics, the macho scene in which Brandon, Steve and Tommy pass around a shotgun, shooting up appliances and housewares, wedding gifts that Tommy and his bride never opened.

“I like to go for the reality, I like to go for what’s underneath,” Peirce said. “And I don’t even judge it. But that isn’t what all Hollywood movies are. . . . That’s an example where my success in ‘Boys’ brought me this great Hollywood career and all these offers that I really appreciate, but I really have a very particular thing that I like doing. I love real emotion, I love real drama. I love guys shooting up wedding presents.”

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paul.brownfield@latimes.com