Review No.153: Return

The story of a soldier returning home from war and trying to adjust to new surroundings isn't an original filmic concept indeed we've seen it in two best picture winners 1946's The Best Years of Our Lives and to an extent 2009's The Hurt Locker. Liza Johnson's Return does flip the idea on its head slightly as the returning war veteran is a woman, Kelli played by former ER actress Linda Cardellini, coming home after a year serving in the army supplies unit. Kelli's husband Mike, played by the always brilliant Michael Shannon, has essentially been filling the roles of both parents two their two young girls as well as attending spouse group and denying his wife sex when she first comes back. It is the resentment that Mike has had to play, in his own words, Mr Mum that starts to wreck the couple's relationship as does the fact that Kelli doesn't really want to open up about her experiences leading him to think that she may have had an affair. Kelli's experiences at war have changed her and she feels she no longer knows her daughters or her husband while she finds her warehouse job monotonous eventually quitting an action that adds further problems to her marriage. Over the course of the film Kelli essentially has a mini breakdown as she basically loses everything after drinking and driving so is sent to an AA meeting where she meets John Slattery's Bud a fellow veteran who is the only person that she really confides in over the course of the film. Return is about how emotion gets sapped out of you after seeing truly horrific things that others around you just understand and to that extent it does work as a film.

I feel that the best thing about Return was also the element about the film that bothered me the most namely the fact that Kelli is so emotionally detached throughout the film. Though the film is built around the fact that Kelli's inability to open up about what's happened to her over the last year after a while I felt a little alienated by the character to the point that I wasn't really that bothered about what happened to her. That's no fault at all though of Linda Cardellini who gives a career best performance of Kelli a woman who has a lot going on behind her eyes and is unable to convey the true horrors of what she has seen. Michael Shannon was also perfect casting as Mike as he is an actor that can do placid one minute before completely snapping the next and Johnson's script meant that he could portray a whole range of emotions. To me Return loses its way when Mike and Kelli's marriage starts to fragment as from that moment on it lapses slightly into cliché save the charismatic turn from John Slattery as the still suffering war veteran Bud. Anne Etheridge's cinematography captures Kelli's struggle to go back to her mundane existence as it slips between gloomy shots of factories, bars and the family home. I personally enjoyed the fact that this was about a female officer as it's about time that the movies recognised that the military isn't simply a boy's club having said that there's nothing too memorable about this film which ends in a way that most of us saw coming from the very first scene.

Verdict:Return's meandering structure and alienating lead character means that at some points I found it hard to care about those involved in the films however due to the fantastic work by the cast I can't mark this lower than 6.5/10