Bearer of Bad News

Oren Moverman’s The Messenger

by Jay Blotcher, August 31, 2009

Speaking about The Messenger, the film selected to open the tenth annual Woodstock Film Festival, screenwriter-director Oren Moverman said emphatically, “It’s really not a political film at all, and it really isn’t about the Iraq War.” Yet the film’s plot—an unsparing look at the soldiers who return and the families who must go on when they do not return—seems like it could have been ripped from the pages of an Iraq War vet’s diary.

The Messenger, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival, stars Ben Foster (who played outlaw Charlie Prince in 3:10 to Yuma) as Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery, a wounded and angry soldier just back from Iraq. In his remaining days of service, he is assigned the heart-wrenching work of notifying families of soldiers who have been killed in battle, and ordered to do so mechanically by a veteran superior officer, Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson). When Montgomery falls in love with a new army widow (Samantha Morton), he must confront the morality of his situation, even as he welcomes a sense of intimacy that he thought the war had deadened for good.

While this is his directorial debut, Moverman has written many critically lauded works, including director Todd Haynes’s semiotic meditation on Bob Dylan, I’m Not There, and the junkie epic, Jesus’ Son, directed by Alison Maclean.

Moverman had not planned on helming this project. When he and cowriter Alessandro Camon began work on The Messenger three years ago, the late Sydney Pollack expressed interest in filming it. He planned to focus on what he saw as “a forbidden love” between Montgomery and Olivia Pitterson, the war widow. But Moverman felt the greater story was between the staff sergeant and his captain, so Pollack “moved on, but remained a friend and advisor on the project,” according to Moverman. After two other directors, including Ben Affleck, suggested script revisions but then opted for other projects, Moverman was encouraged by producer Mark Gordon to take the reins. Despite his neophyte status, Foster and Harrelson signed on, as did Steve Buscemi as the father of a soldier killed in battle.