Not one of the many American movies about the Iraq War has been made by a former soldier — until now. The Israeli-born, U.S.-based writer-director Oren Moverman earns that distinction with his powerhouse debut feature, The Messenger.
The quietly riveting independent film stars Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson as casualty notification officers whose job entails delivering the news to the next of kin that a loved one has died. The script offers no hint that the director and co-writer served in the Israel Defense Forces, although that experience helped Moverman immeasurably on the set.
“These are different countries, different wars, different eras, different types of terrorism. Everything’s different, but fundamentally I felt that I could communicate to the actors what it meant to be a soldier,” Moverman says, “and to communicate with the film the emotional landscape of fear and anger and guilt and the inability to express a lot of the experiences you go through in combat. That stuff I felt very comfortable with.”
Moverman lived in the U.S. from 13 to 18, when his family moved back to Israel and he entered the army.
“There’s nothing in the movie that’s per se my own personal experience,” he says. “And even if there is, it’s probably stuff that I don’t notice or I’m too afraid to talk about.”
He returned to New York four years later, after he completed his service, to pursue a career in film and has now lived more than half his life in the States. Moverman’s credits include collaborating on the screenplay for I’m Not There, which explored the life and myth of Bob Dylan.
A good deal of The Messenger, which opens Nov. 27 in Seattle, was shot at Fort Dix with a military advisor and photographer on the set, as well as extras supplied by the U.S. Army. Moverman was surprised at the reaction he received.
“I got a lot of respect for being an Israeli soldier,” the soft-spoken, hyper-articulate filmmaker recalls with a wry smile. “Much more than I deserved. There’s definitely a feeling of camaraderie and a feeling of “˜You’re an ally, and your experiences are real.’ I didn’t expect that, but I only benefited from it.”
Moverman was received with parallel good will when he returned to Israel to show The Messenger at the Jerusalem Film Festival. “Partially they see me as a representative of Israel, because that’s what happens with anyone Israeli who works outside the country and does okay,” he says, laughing. “But partially they identified with what the movie was about and they felt it was very much about them.”
While the U.S. Army sends two men to break the news to the soldier’s parents or spouse and then leave, the Israeli team consists of four people, including a doctor and a psychologist, who stay and provide for the family. Many, many Israeli films, especially in the 1970s and ‘80s, centered on the army, and a few include a notification scene.
“I grew up watching all those movies,” Moverman remembers, “and for a while Israeli cinema was just stuck in the army experience, which makes perfect sense because that was central to Israeli life. Everyone was connected through the army. It took a different generation to start developing other stories. But I had those movies in my mind. In approaching this [film], I remembered the pitfalls and what happened when a movie was political and how easily dismissed it was.”
Some viewers will see The Messenger as antiwar simply by virtue of its acknowledgement of combat deaths. But Moverman worked and reworked the screenplay (with Alessandro Camon) to provoke a more complex and thoughtful reaction.
“What we wanted to do was make a film that’s not political, that’s not pro-war or antiwar, but in war,” Moverman explains. “If the movie becomes political, then it’s part of an argument. And being Israeli, I’ve had my healthy share of experience in arguments.”
Moverman’s parents were born in British-mandate Palestine. His grandparents had left Poland in 1935 and their entire family was subsequently wiped out.
“The first thing that I knew in my conscious life was the Holocaust — the war and what the war did,” Moverman says. “At least, that was the beginning of my search for what the war did.”
His fascination with the world of his grandparents led to his immersion in the great Yiddish writers, such as Jacob Glatstein (whom he reads in Hebrew). And it has more than a little to do with his next assignment, adapting Daniel Mendelsohn’s nonfiction epic The Lost: A Search For Six of Six Million for the screen.
Although he doesn’t say so, one discerns that his new project shares an underlying theme with The Messenger.
“Life has pain, there’s grief, there’s loss, and the question is how do you get back to being alive,” Moverman muses. “You do it through very, very simple mechanisms, such as love and friendship and shared emotions and shared experiences.”
The complexities of war
