Strong and Moving!

Sadly Over-hyped

An Exercise In Nonsense

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Return is ultimately about the inner turmoil that a woman has on her return from her tour of duty. It's nothing incredibly original, but it's written and directed with enough sensibility and delicacy, and a woman being at the front and center may be something different for viewers. It works because it's never emotionally contrived and it never comes off as anything other than heartfelt and personal. What makes this as effective as it was were the performances. The entire supporting cast does some really solid work, but the praise belongs to Linda Cardellini, who gives a wonderfully understated and subtle performance. It's in her silent moments that she resonates the most with the audience, and she absolutely deserves a lot more mentions. She's either on par or better than several of the actresses in contention for awards. This is highly recommended because it deserves to put Cardellini on the spotlight, and I can only hope this gets seen enough in the upcoming months and as a result it gives her more career opportunities.

The film, which I found could be disturbing and powerful, stars Linda Cardellini and Michael Shannon.Cardellini is superb as a returning Army veteran where she worked in the supply chain but apparently in a war zone. Although it's never specified you would guess it's Afghanistan or Iraq.She's greeted at the airport by her husband(Shannon) and her two daughters. They return to their small town home in Ohio.It's quickly apparent that Cardellini is not the same woman that she was when she left for her one year tour of duty. Seemingly quite depressed she begins to display increasingly erratic and volatile behavior.One day, on a spur of the moment decision, she quits her long time warehouse job, which had been held for her while she served overseas. She is arrested for a DUI and her license is suspended. One day she gets her days confused and forgets to pick up her daughter, who is found by the police trying to walk home.All of this leads to severe marital discord, and her husband files and receives an emergency custody of their two daughters but she will be allowed to have unsupervised custody on the weekends.Cardellini starts to attend court mandated AA meetings but really doesn't open up there about her problems. As she files for a court hearing on custody she gets a redeployment notice from the Army.She then resorts to more desperate measures which I'll leave to the viewer to see.This is Cardellini's film and she doesn't disappoint with a riveting and nuanced performance. It can be difficult to watch at times and disturbing but I felt it was worth it.The film also shines a light on a major problem in this country. You read all the time how returning veterans suffer severe marital stress, turn to addictions, or even commit suicide. Yet it seems not enough turn to any available programs from the V.A. or other organizations. There must be a better way of immediately reaching out to returning vets and helping them cope with the realities of their lives.

I know this is a bit of stretch, but here it goes: Remember "Disco & Dragons", the last episode from Freaks and Geeks? Well, what if Linda Cardellini (as Lindsay Weir), who duped her parents into thinking she was going to a summer college academic summit, never did get to Ann Arbor again and enroll at The Univ. of Michigan. She followed that Grateful Dead tour for about a year, and finally got off the VW micro-bus somewhere in Ohio. She gets a dead-end factory job, joins the reserves, meets and marries a local plumber guy, has a couple of kids, and then has to go abroad for an extended tour of tedious guard duty. Coming back home on the other side of age thirty, she just can't seem to reconnect with her old life (husband, kids, job, friends) at all. A quick downward spiral finds her in rehab, and then she gets the news she's got to go back overseas on active duty once more. Kind of a bit much for a young, fragile mom with two kids she loves no longer in her custody. And there's your movie.Yeah, there was a quick subplot, as she tried to get pregnant to avoid going overseas again. Once she hooked-up with an Oxycodone snorting Roger Sterling from "Mad Men" she met in rehab, and then tried again with her factory buddy Mickey Doyle from "Boardwalk Empire", but neither of these desperate attempts were 'successful'.In the end, we're supposed to get a bit of a tied-up gut as viewers, when she hastily grabs the kids and drives away from it all for several miles, only to reluctantly return and get on her fatigues again.This low-budget indie movie could have worked, as the acting (including Michael Shannon as her hubby) was good. There just wasn't a compelling enough story to grab you in. And unfortunately, (mostly) all post 9/11 war-related movies (and war-at-home movies) have died on the vine, commercially, if not critically, and RETURN certainly falls in the category. Maybe it would have found an audience as a TV movie.

"This is just a giant waste of time. I can't do it anymore." After Kelli (Cardellini) returns home from the war she finds it much harder to adjust then expected. Finding life mundane and pointless she begins to drift. When her husband Mike (Shannon) leaves with the kids she is forced to deal with her problem. There have been many, many movies made about problems returning soldiers experience when trying to adjust to day-to-day life. "Home Of The Brave" is one of the more recent great ones. Like that movie this one deals with how she feels that life is so mundane and boring it begins to affect her relationships with others. The main problem with this one is that it seems to take forever to go anywhere. The acting is great and the story is good but again it is very slow and sometimes hard to stay interested in. I would compare this to the recent "Take Shelter" movie in its pacing and feel. If you liked that movie you will probably like this one too. Overall, a very OK movie that could have been better. I give it a B-.