Taking No Chances

Those searching for signs of how leaner economic times are being felt at Sundance 2009 need look no further than the fact that the festival's opening weekend yielded only one major sale -- and that one was something of a foregone conclusion. Although the tepid reaction to director Antoine Fuqua's Brooklyn's Finest from critics and audiences alike led upstart Senator Entertainment (which paid a reported $5 million for the North American distribution rights) to immediately start calling the film a "work in progress," you had to figure that if a cop drama from the director of Training Day, starring Richard Gere and Ethan Hawke, couldn't close a deal at Sundance this year, it really was going to be a long 10 days in the snow.

Meanwhile, one of the best films to premiere thus far in the festival's dramatic competition isn't even seeking a theatrical deal, but will go straight from Sundance to HBO in a little over one month's time. The movie is called Taking Chance and it would, admittedly, be a tough sell to moviegoers even in a boom market. Based on the journal kept by now-retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Michael R. Strobl as he escorted the body of a decorated PFC killed in Iraq back to his family, Taking Chance has the double misfortune of arriving at a moment when the industry has reached an undeniable state of Middle East fatigue. "If they even see 'Asalaam alaikum' on the page, they close the script," one well-known Hollywood screenwriter recently told me, citing as an example a spec script he had recently sold, then been asked to rewrite so as to remove any reference to Iraq, Afghanistan or Islam. The box-office implosion of Ridley Scott's recent Body of Lies seems to have been the straw that broke this particular camel's back, but even many smaller, more indie-flavored dramas and documentaries about America's Middle East misadventures have been greeted with similar audience apathy.

I myself came with some degree of trepidation to Taking Chance, which on paper sounds like an unholy marriage of two recent films that tried and failed to effectively dramatize the homefront impact of the Iraq campaign: the vomitously maudlin Grace Is Gone (in which John Cusack shilled shamelessly for an Oscar as a father hiding the death of his Marine wife from his two young daughters) and the Paul Haggis-ed In the Valley of Elah (in which Tommy Lee Jones' Iraq vet son turns up dead and Jones responds by hanging an American flag upside-down). Then there's that too-clever-by-half title, Taking Chance -- because, you know, the fallen Marine's name was Chance and he's being taken home. And yet, this is an Iraq movie that consistently defies your expectations, and then exceeds them.

The directorial debut of the veteran indie producer Ross Katz (whose credits include In the Bedroom and Lost in Translation), Taking Chance announces early on that its intentions are of a procedural (rather than polemical) nature. The film begins on a black screen, while the soundtrack illustrates the Mahmoudiyah IED attack that leaves PFC Chance Phelps among its casualties. Katz then goes on to document the preparation and transportation of Phelps' body as it is packed into ice on the landing strip of a German air base, flown to the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base, x-rayed for explosives, vacuumed of moisture, cleansed (along with Phelps' personal belongings) of dried blood and finally prepared for burial. No detail is too small or insignificant for Katz -- one scene depicts the tailoring of new uniforms for the dead. All of it is filmed with a stark, clinical intensity that suggests this is work performed day in and day out, over and over again.

For many filmmakers, the default inclination would be to bring us as close as possible to Phelps, whether by way of flashbacks or testimonials -- to put an individual face on what might otherwise seem just another flag-draped casket. But it speaks to the tact, simplicity and intelligence of Katz's approach that he elects to keep Phelps a largely abstract figure -- or, rather, a representative one, of all those men and women who fight and die for our country, regardless of whether we approve of the conflict in which they fight.

It's hard, I think, for a movie to engender much respect for the U.S. Military these days, let alone convince you of the fundamental goodness of people, but Taking Chance manages to do both precisely by not trying too hard to do either. Katz's film is, at heart, a classically structured road movie that begins in the suburban homes and corporate military offices of Quantico, Virginia and gradually winds its way to the wide-open spaces of Wyoming. In between, Strobl (who is played in the film by Kevin Bacon) encounters ordinary citizens who disarm him -- and us -- with their quiet kindness and dignity: the flight attendant who gives Strobl her crucifix; the pilot who tells him he can remember the name of every killed-in-action soldier he has ever transported; and the old Korean War vet (a superb Tom Aldredge) who invokes a bygone era's sense of honor and duty. By that point in the film, we seem to have traveled not merely West, but back in time -- a feeling capped by a country funeral that Katz stages as though it were an outtake from My Darling Clementine.

Taking Chance isn't always as good as that. Like many first-time directors, Katz has a tendency to use original music as an emotional crutch, and his subtle, tasteful direction occasionally verges on being too discrete for its own good. Still, Katz has made one of the few Iraq movies that, along with Brian De Palma's Redacted, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker and parts of Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss, feels vital to our celluloid record of this seismic moment in American history. He has also created an extraordinary showcase for Bacon, who is the sort of actor audiences get in the habit of taking for granted (he has never been nominated for an Oscar) because he is so consistently good and so rarely self-aggrandizing. Here, his largely nonverbal performance consists of a rigid military posture and a face that is a remarkable palimpsest of grief and the impotent rage Strobl (a Desert Storm vet) feels at having passed up his chance at a second tour of duty.

This is a movie to see, whether on large screens or small. That most people will only be able to experience it the latter way is unfortunate, yet entirely understandable, given that theatrical distribution -- for all but the biggest Hollywood blockbusters -- has now devolved into a loss leader for DVD sales and cable broadcast. So it's not all that surprising that HBO Films, which had a modest theatrical success in 2002 with Real Women Have Curves and another one the following year with American Splendor, set a February 21 broadcast date for Taking Chance before Sundance even began. Factor in the day-and-date cable/theatrical models already being embraced by IFC Films and Magnolia Pictures and we may well be entering the era in which the true success of indie movies will be measured not in ticket sales but rather in TiVo downloads. Happy viewing.