Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Return

Return has an abiding interest in the the subtle power of trauma to alter our view of the world, to make the familiar seem strange. For recently-returned vet Kelli, this comes not in the form of any one thing she did or even witnessed while deployed but rather the long, drawn-out process of simply being “there.” Her non-combat position in the National Guard has instilled in her a general unease that’s initially imperceptible but becomes more and more pervasive as time goes on—like the frog slowly brought to a boil in a pot of once-cold water. Were these aftereffects to hit her all at once, Kelli might know how best to react; because they’re so gradual, she’s never able to fully resist their slow hold on her. “There’s weird shit there” is as specific as she tends to get when asked about the war, whether by her husband, friends, or coworkers; it’s the slow accumulation of small details that are either different or somehow “off” that gets to her.

Such is Kelli’s struggle, and she finds no easy answers. Writer-director Liza Johnson takes a measured approach to all this that’s both a saving grace and, at times, a detriment. Her evenhandedness as a filmmaker is to be commended, but it sometimes gets in the way of actual drama—compelling things happen, mind, but the characters almost always under-react to them and then simply move on. Too little resonates as much as it could or should, leaving us not with a series of ups and downs to make sense of but instead with a constant environment of detachment and restraint in which it’s difficult to become fully involved. Even so, the path so stringently avoided by Return—a deep dark secret from the soldier’s deployment, troubling flashbacks played out as nightmares, PTSD-induced breakdowns—is so well-trod that its absence here is ultimately refreshing. This is a story unique for how normal it is, and laudable for its humbleness.

Where Return most comes into its own is in Kelli’s dealings with fellow veteran Bud. An off-the-grid Alcoholics Anonymous attendee with issues of his own, he injects much-needed personality into a film that’s occasionally too unassuming for its own good. There’s a momentum and openness to these scenes that briefly reinvigorates the film, even if the stakes still aren’t raised as high as one might hope. Johnson’s quasi-documentary technique imbues the story with an uninterrupted air of realism, reminding us how common stories like Kelli’s really are. It’s the plainness of this fact, as well as how unspoken it is, that makes the film quite stark in in its own way: to embellish it would be both disingenuous and unnecessary. This is daily life for a great many people, and it needn’t be sensationalized in order to affect us.

There’s nary a political thread to be found here, but there is undoubtedly a humanist bent. In its own way the film is a snapshot of working-class Ohio, a semi-rural area that isn’t quite depressed but could certainly be doing better. Johnson smartly chooses not to linger over dilapidated homes and abandoned factories (though they’re certainly there) as a means of conveying this, instead letting the sense of place evoked by long walks down country roads speak for itself. It’s telling that, though Return never specifies exactly where Kelli has been during her year-long deployment—we may presume it’s Iraq or Afghanistan, but never with any certainty—her re-entry into the normal world is very much site-specific. In the end it isn’t what happened “there” that most affects her, but rather how it negatively shapes her perception of home.

by Michael Nordine   on 29 Feb 2012 11:37 PM   Source: DVD screener