Chris Barsanti has been a Filmcritic reviewer since 2002. So there.As long as there has been war there have been warriors, and as long as there have been warriors there has been the question of how they stop being warriors once the war (at least for them) is over? As Danfung Dennis's grievously evocative documentary shows, warriors don't stop fighting once they leave the field of battle. All too often, their new enemy is themselves.
Photojournalist Dennis embedded with a company of Marines from the Eighth Regiment in the summer of 2009, just as they were being hurled into the middle of the allies' ramped-up offensive against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. Without narration, his camera tracks the Marines as they gear up in the dusty, helicopter rotor-whipped base, getting a final sendoff from their commander: "Echo Company is going to change history." Off they fly, deposited with rude and quick violence into the stark tapestry of the southern Afghan hinterlands. The sky burns bright blue and the patches of greenery flare against the dusty fields and mud-brick houses from where invisible Taliban snipe and harass. Seemingly within minutes, a Marine is dead.
Back in the United States, platoon sergeant Nathan Harris is trawling the aisles of a Wal-Mart, bleary with pain medication and motivated only by the possibility of getting back into the field with Echo and finishing his third tour. He's twenty-five and something of an arrested adolescent, with his wispy mustache and loopy, appealing sense of humor that shades quickly into depression. "I got shot in Afghanistan, about a month ago," he says to an old woman in the store, who hears the longing and the sense of loss in his med-wracked drone of his voice and hugs him.Dennis toggles back and forth between these two dramatic poles with little warning, trying to give the viewer a sense of how it is for somebody like Harris to be summarily ejected from the life that gave him purpose, even as its echoes continue to reverberate through him. One minute we see Harris in full Marine gear frazzled and at wit's end trying to communicate with an Afghan elder through an interpreter, and the next he's slumped in the passenger seat of a car being driven by his patient wife, a purse-size bag of prescription medications between them. Dennis bleeds the sounds of war into the back-home scenes in such a way that it seems the farthest thing from a gimmick, but the closest impression civilians could get of this veteran's mental landscape. The fractured and frightened tensions this effect leaves in the film make it almost seem natural when Harris starts waving around a loaded handgun in his house or the car -- how else to protect oneself against the enemies that are surely out there?
Even while focusing on Harris's rough and mostly unwilling rehabilitation back into civilian life -- he gradually becomes aware that his life as a Marine grunt is over, never mind that that's all he wants to be -- the film leavens in some darkly graceful moments that heighten the impact considerably. Dennis's filming is a work of wonder, with deftly framed and richly colored shots that make so many films shot on handheld cameras look like cheap amateur work in comparison. His ability to merge that gimlet eye for harsh and dramatic beauty with the pitiless realities of his subject, whether it's the tired rage of Afghan villagers sick of getting caught between Taliban and American bullets or the stifling sadness of a memorial service back home, make Hell and Back Again one of the greatest war films of this generation. It has the artistry of a painting and the impact of a sucker punch.
