(already subscribe? log in).

‘Hell and Back Again,’ presents war flashbacks from different perspective

MOVIE REVIEW

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

January 06, 2012|By Wesley Morris

Nathan Harris, a Marine, on the battlefield in the documentary Hell and… (Danfung Dennis/Docurama…)

With some documentaries, you can feel the filmmakers hit a wall. They have a great subject - the war in Afghanistan, say - and they have a point to make or an angle to pursue. But, despite the proliferation of talking heads, they can’t find a style or a voice. The heads talk, but the movie doesn’t speak. Danfung Dennis doesn’t appear to have a limit. It’s as if he’s seen (or knows we’ve seen) some of these movies and understands that the flavorlessness of even the most well-meant, clearly articulated filmmaking can leave you unroused, undisturbed, indifferent to what you’re being told and shown.

Conversely, his film, “Hell and Back Again,’’ is an ingenious artistic disturbance. It’s a combat film and a coming-home movie, chiefly about a Marine named Nathan Harris, who’s critically wounded in Afghanistan and struggling to re-adjust to both the brutal drabness of civilian life in North Carolina and the depressing state of his lower body. Harris’s condition has provided the basis of the stories and movies and books. But Dennis’s film attempts something few documentaries have: to inhabit the psyche of its subject.

Harris is a small, sleepy, increasingly addled guy. His hip was shattered, he’s taking at least nine prescription medications, and, as he recovers, he uses a walker to get around. Cruising a Walmart parking lot with his wife, Ashley, he can sense that this monotonous anticlimax could last the rest of his life and says he’d truly rather be in Afghanistan hunting for something besides a spot to leave the car. Inside the store, he glides through the aisles on a motorized cart. He stops to admire digital cameras and makes Ashley pretend she’s at a photo shoot. Then in the video-game section, something appears to happen.

Harris stares up into a looming case, where a copy of “Call of Duty 4’’ awaits, and, for several seconds, the camera lingers on his gaze, which turns distant. As he stares yonder, we hear his voice on the soundtrack, then we’re back in Afghanistan on a beautiful-looking day hunting insurgents. This is Dennis’s innovation: a documentary war flashback. Who knows whether what we’re seeing is actually what’s on Harris’s mind in that moment. But he’s given Dennis and Dennis’s editor, Fiona Otway, the license to imply as much. Suddenly, ordinary deployment footage is recast as living memory.