It has been a year since I saw The Hurt Locker. I watched that again and it didn’t let me down – it’s still a beautiful and hauntingly film which inspires me to make films which make my audiences cry and smile, like I did. So I was looking forward to The Dry Land but was different to what I thought it’d be – but in a good way.
It was different because it was about what happens in the wake of returning, not about how is like to serve, and so this time there was a much more of a disappointed slant on the war – what I mean is that in The Hurt Locker I end up feeling that it was worthwhile – all the pain was worth it because they loved it. With James, the main protagonist in The Dry Land, I felt that his service, his sacrifice and pain was futile. The performance was amazing, right from the start I could feel the character through his eyes – the blue of them was hauntingly empty. He managed to tell me that the war is not an imaginary story, or a clever metaphor or something that is far far away; it is right here with the families that get left behind and it is brought home in the eyes of the men who return.
The Dry Land is a movie which has a slow pace but it’s full enough to keep us interested as we see James wonder what he doing here, back home and where is home anyway? It's not back over in Iraq and it's not here. Him and his wife, Sarah (America Ferrara) live on the outbacks of Texas - Diane Henderson gives a good review, but it was slightly misleading in the fact that Ferrara ‘shows true range as Sarah’, the main protagonist’s wife. True, Ferrara gives a solid performance and is not unlikable but the review insinuates that we would see more of her character development. Instead she is much more of a minor character than I expected. However, this does not affect the film as a whole in the slightest. On the contrary, each character supports the central performance of Ryan O’Nan, who plays the Iraq veteran, incredibly well. Not for a moment does the audience feel that we are losing him to other performances and we grow to see more of his thoughts with each scene.
The camerawork is not entirely steady, but this is good, because at the same time we can feel like we are part of the scene just that little bit more, but the wavering lines tell us that not all is well, their life together is unsecure.
As James struggles to find his memories, he struggles with day-to-day life as well. Taking on the job at the abattoir we are given a scene, which is incredibly simple, yet tragic. As James is shown what to do with the cow, we watch him recoil emotionally as the blood streams from the animal. The direction was great here because there was no coyness displayed – we saw every step of the electrocution – just as a soldier would experience every step of killing another man.
Small twists of humour keep the movie from becoming a swamp of darkness for the audience to be dragged through – later on, when James has found his friend, Raymond, you can’t help but laugh when he replies to James asking if his wife was cool with this (he’s just jumped in James’s truck and they’re about to take an unplanned road trip) you suddenly hear her shouting after him: “Yeah, we should probably go..”
The movie is well balanced but I definitely welled up at two points. First when, after James has found out what happened out there (he was suffering from memory loss and had gone to see his other friend, who he had saved, to find out from him), his friend Jason asks him: “Did you find what you were looking for?” and he can’t give much more of an answer than a slight nod. Is it really best to dig for the truth and fill back up what your mind has instinctively hidden and protected you from? Secondly and lastly was when James’s mother, as she is dying, tells him “We’ve all done things, James.” I felt was such a true example of someone else trying to offer him a small piece of solace and redemption – we all do things, nobody goes through life without a regret and so the best we can do afterwards is try to move on and recognise you can’t change the past.
Lots of small things impressed me with this film. It was a film which made me think things like: who is the luckiest one?; what have we done?; is it better to know or not to know?
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