It seems that the pairing of Samuel L. Jackson and Curtis Jackson is enough to make headlines – I saw more than one story about their new movie floating around the net this week (even heard something about it on the radio). Didn’t realize there was some sort of a feud between them...hey, I didn’t even realize that Curtis Jackson was 50 Cent. My lack of cool is showing.

But I’m not interested in the détente of the Jacksons; I’m interested in the movie they are making. Called Home of the Brave, the film will be a dramatic portrayal of soldiers returning from the Iraq war and trying to re-enter life at home (cast will also include Jessica Biel, Eva Mendes and Christina Ricci).

Per Blackfilm.com

(Samuel L.) Jackson will play a doctor who has been stationed in Iraq for several months. After months of holding it together on the homefront, his wife is thrilled when he returns to his home and his regular practice. However, the man she sent away to war is not the same man that has returned. To her shock and dismay, her husband is rapidly unraveling before her eyes. Filming is set to begin late February in Spokane, WA and Morocco.

Although the quality of the film is yet to be determined, the premise intrigues me. The difficulty of post-war readjustment is an under-told story; we like the illusion that things are automatically OK when soldiers return from war. And there have been so few films about the current war; at most we have the slanted conspiracy tales, like Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War, or the documentaries that no one sees about soldiers' lives in Iraq (see the Rotten Tomatoes stats on Gunner Palace).

I imagine that a film with these popular stars might actually get seen. So, I wonder about the effects of such a film on our collective understanding about war. It puts me in mind of “Valkyries over Iraq,” a November 2005 Harper's Magazine article by Lawrence Weschler. The article takes a deep and multilayered look at a scene in the recent film Jarhead, which is based on Anthony Swofford’s book about his experiences as a Marine during the first Gulf War. The scene is an extrapolation of the first few pages of Swofford’s book - his description of soldiers’ preparatory activities “after hearing of imminent war in the Middle East”: get the jarhead haircut, buy beer and “rent all of the war movies they can get their hands on.”

In his book, Swofford says it simply and, in fact, the scene in the film, which has a group of Marines cheering on Robert Duvall and his soldiers during the Valkyries scene in Apocalypse Now, has less of an impact than Swofford’s directness:

“…the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills. Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man; with film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his real First F***.”

Weschler takes on this notion of war pornography with an intense analysis of the Valkyries scene: Wagner’s original intention and vision for the Ring Cycle and The Ride of the Valkyries; the original Apocalypse Now scene; the director (Coppola), screenwriter (John Milius) and film editor (Walter Murch) of AN; director (Sam Mendes) and film editor (Murch again) of Jarhead; and Jarhead itself. At the conclusion of his investigation, Weschler reminds us that the Gulf War was over before it began and that, with the air war as the means of our side’s triumph, the ground forces, including Swofford, never get the consummation of the Valkyries scene foreplay.

He then ends with a moment of conjecture:

"Samuel Fuller once said that for a film to be truly true to the actual nature of war, bullets would need to be spraying out from the screen, taking out members of the audience at random, one by one, in scattershot carnage. This, of course, is not that film. But to the extent that Coppola was right in his insight that an antiwar film might of necessity need to exclude the depiction of war fighting itself (at the time I’d though he had ben referring to something like Grand Illusion or King of Hearts), the Gulf War of 1990 may turn out to have been almost unique in lending itself to that sort of treatment (at least from the American side)."

My own experience of watching the film (at the United Artists theater in Brooklyn Heights) suggests that this might not be the case (or, at least, not the case with this particular film). At the most serious moments of the film (none of which, in my opinion, were portrayed with the same level of cynicism or calculated bluntness of Swofford’s book) my audience laughed and laughed (and talked on their cell phones). Nothing moved them: not the humiliation of grunt training; the debilitating frustration of no action; the depiction of the Highway of Death; nor the lost Vietnam vet at the end of the film. For the most part, they thought it was all pretty funny (or something to cheer about).

So my new question is: could the real antiwar film be the type of film that Home of the Brave sounds like it wants to be? Here, the emphasis is not on the war fighting, but on the psychological aftermath of the men (and women?!) returning home from war. And unlike a film such as Born on the Fourth of July, it will not be lodged in the trenchant narrative that surrounds Vietnam-era political activism, in our generalized discomfort with physical disability, or (likely) in the complicated approach that permeates an Oliver Stone film. This is a film that will be set back at home, the soldiers placed in the context of their families and the shattering of the illusion of health the narrative crux of the piece. So, as of now, I’m choosing to keep an open mind on the potential of the film as a work of art; more than anything, I’m engaged by the premise: it has all the promise of a cold shower.