"The Messenger" (2009) is a sensitive drama about two American soldiers whose job is to inform families that their loved ones have been killed in Iraq. It was nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay. It was screened at the Sundance Film Festival and at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Bear for best screenplay.

"The Messenger" (2009) is a sensitive drama about two American soldiers whose job is to inform families that their loved ones have been killed in Iraq. The film, which Italian-American screenwriter Alessandro Camon cowrote with Oren Moverman , was nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay. It was screened at the Sundance Film Festival and at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Bear for best screenplay. "The Messenger" opens in Israel next week, a few days after the Oscars ceremony. 

In the film, Ben Foster plays Staff Sgt. Will Montgomery, who was wounded in combat in Iraq. He is released from the hospital three months before the end of his tour of duty and is assigned to the casualty-notification service, as the partner of Cpt. Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson, nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actor). As if that were not tough enough, Montgomery is informed that his girlfriend, whom he hasn't seen since leaving for Iraq, is about to marry someone else. The cast also includes Samantha Morton as a recent army widow with whom Montgomery becomes involved and Steve Buscemi as a bereaved father.  "This isn't a political movie,",,, "It's an attempt to tell a small story which is specific but also abstract and universal, about coping with mourning and bereavement."... 

Moverman met his future wife in New York when he was 15. In 1984 he and Yael returned to Israel for their compulsory army service. "I had no access to movies so I read a great deal about the cinema: Japanese, Italian, French, British, American." 

After their discharge, the couple returned to the United States. "If I am going to make movies, I thought, it's better to do it in a place where I don't belong," he says. "I never felt that I belonged. New York is a comfortable place for people who don't feel comfortable. I wanted to be in a place where one can invent stories and make movies, to create reality. 

Moverman actually began his cinematic career by writing about movies. While attending Brooklyn College (studying cinema, philosophy, genetics and English), he wrote film reviews for the Hebrew-language newspaper Maariv New York. Subsequently he switched to English in the American magazine Interview, in which he mostly published interviews with film personalities. 

His experience in the Israel Defense Forces stood him in good stead while making "The Messenger," he says: "I spent a lot of time in Lebanon and in the territories - this was at the start of the first intifada, in Gaza - and I understood the process a soldier undergoes: the trauma, the distress, the situation in which it's impossible to win and to do your job. I told the actors a lot of stories from that period. For the Ben Foster character I especially built up the complicated emotional aspects [of military life], which consist, among other elements, of many fears, boredom, emptiness and adrenaline that floods through you at certain moments. One out of every six soldiers has experiences that are traumatic for them, they all have baggage." ,,,,

The movie is also laced with black humor. "If the movie were gloomy from start to finish, I myself would not want to see it. The humor makes it more gentle. Humor also makes it possible to survive in sad and depressing periods of war and mourning." 

Do you think the Israeli audience will experience the film differently from the American audience? 

"The armed forces constitute a very small portion of the American population, and the great majority here don't have first-hand experience with the phenomenon of soldiers who don't return from the battlefield. People might read an article about it here and there in the paper, but they do not feel personally the price that is paid in going to war. The penetration of a person's intimate space during mourning is also something the American mentality will not deal with." ...

To make the situation as realistic as possible Moverman shot all the scenes in which Foster's and Harrelson's characters inform families of the death of their family member in extremely long takes - and without telling the actors exactly what they would encounter when they knocked on the door. This element of improvisation gave these scenes an added intensity and emotional weight. 

"I knew that everything depended on the acting. This is not a movie with stunts, rather one about human situations, about an intense emotional experience. I kept Foster and Harrelson separate from the actors playing the relatives. They didn't know how the 'families' would react, nor were they familiar with the interior sets of the soldiers' homes. That made it possible to maintain the freshness of the scenes, the raw nerves. We could let ourselves improvise and allow the viewers to experience the full power of those moments." ......

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1153969.html
 

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