Return Won’t Have Audiences Doing the Same
Return is a bargain-budget bore by writer-director Liza Johnson about a female soldier back from a tour of active duty in Iraq who cannot adjust to life at home. Better movies have been made about the subject of veterans trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives on a home front that has changed in their absence and moved on without them. I am thinking of the classic The Best Years of Our Lives, of course, but that was another kind of war, and the last one that made any universal sense. Recently, channeling Afghanistan and Iraq, there has been Neil Burger’s The Lucky Ones and Oren Moverman’s The Messenger. Indifferent audiences stayed away in droves. They are almost certain to avoid Return as well. People just do not seem to be able to summon the proper compassion for people who fought in what many consider to be pointless wars created by the whims of politicians and the military without knowing why they went there in the first place. Read More
