"A" Rating by Robert W. Hammerle

Along with this year's Oscar winning documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side," Kimberly Peirce's "Stop-Loss" provides a searing portrait concerning the true cost of our War on Terror in general, and the Iraqi conflict in particular. It is simply a great war picture, and any of you who still support Bush's splendid little misadventure owe it to yourself to see Ms. Peirce's cinematic gem.

The film opens with an unforgettably shocking sequence where a small American patrol is attacked by some insurgents in Baghdad. The sergeant leading the patrol, memorably played to perfection by Ryan Phillippe, leads his troops in pursuit to disastrous consequences. All of the men are racked with guilt and sorrow over the loss of their friends. Their angst is made all the greater as they are about to return home to the States.

As these returning warriors arrive at a military base in Texas, they are greeted by a parade where family and friends are blissfully ignorant concerning the emotional scars that these boys bring back home. Phillippe, looking forward to leaving the service and returning to civilian life, is callously hit with a stop-loss order, which in effect allows the military to keep him and others in the service and send them back to Iraq. What then happens to Phillippe and his friends is heartbreaking.

I doubt if many of you will be able to watch this film without tears in your eyes, all the more so because tens thousands of soldiers have been stop-losted just as portrayed by Phillippe. In effect, this horribly unfair process operates as a backdoor draft where the military is able to keep its soldiers in the employment of Uncle Sam despite the fact that their enlistment has expired. This practice is as shameful as it is real.

But the real power from this film deals with the physical and psychological scars that these young men bring back home. There is an unforgettable scene where Phillippe visits a close comrade, who has been horribly wounded, in a state side hospital. His friend, (played with an intense honesty by Victor Rasuk), has been blinded, suffered horrible burns on his face and has lost his right arm and leg. This crushing scene reflects the cost of this war on thousands of our young soldiers, and it is not an exaggeration to say that George Bush and Dick Cheney bear the guilt of our nation for needlessly ruining these young boys' lives.

Once Phillippe is stop-losted, he flees from the military while he tries to figure out what to do. He loves his country and has served honorably, but when is enough, enough?

As he hits the road a wanted man, he is accompanied by the fiancé (Abbie Cornish) of a close friend and one his comrades in Iraq. Ms. Cornish gives an unsentimental, raw performance as a young woman trying to help Phillippe while simultaneously wrestling with the posttraumatic stress disorder suffered by her fiancé.

What makes this movie so powerful is that the story is so very real. My own nephew has just returned from one year in Fallujah, which was his second tour of duty in Iraq. He and his friends, like Phillippe and his friends, are suffering the effects of living in a foreign environment where your life could end at any waking moment. Their free time in Iraq was occupied more often than not with drinking and reckless acts, and their adjustment back home has not been easy for the strongest of them.

Ms. Peirce's fine film graphically reminds us that the cost of Bush's elective War exceeds the tragic number of fatalities, standing at this point at over four thousand. Not only do we have thousands horribly wounded who will require great care for years to come, but untold thousands more are left with psychological scars the cost of which is still unknown.

But if history is any judge, the trauma experienced by these fine young boys will play out in violent acts, broken marriages and beaten spouses. Furthermore, it is wise to remember that Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber, learned his trade in the military, while the Washington Sniper, John Allen Muhammad, was a military veteran himself. How many Timothy McVeigh's are we turning loose in society today, and what will be the ultimate cost down the road?

In "Stop-Loss," Ms. Peirce's first film since her remarkable "Boys Don't Cry" (1999), we are all reminded of the hidden cost visited on our troops as a result of any war, much less unnecessary ones like Iraq. It remains an historically shameful act that Bush and Cheney, two men who dodged combat when young Americans were being drafted in Vietnam, so cavalierly sent these boys into this hellacious setting which still has no end in sight five years later.