Highly Overrated But Still Good

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

A more or less unreleased little indie that, for the most part, is as generic as its forgettable title. However, it has one big thing going for it and that is the lead performance, from Freaks and Geeks star Linda Cardellini. While many of her co-stars on that one-season-wonder went on to become big stars, Cardellini has done so little. She was Velma in the Scooby Doo movies, for God's sake. She really knocks it out of the part here as a returning Iraq War veteran who can't re-adjust to normal life. Michael Shannon and John Slattery (of Mad Men fame) co-star, but neither has much to do. Cardellini owns every frame of the movie. The script is nothing special, but she makes it worthwhile. Certainly worth a look, especially if you loved Cardellini on Freaks and Geeks and want to see her shine.

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-.

Careful, subtle, artistic portrait of the inner conflicts and turmoil experienced by a woman soldier on her return home from war. From the beginning of her return to her family we see how there are things seriously troubling her that she herself can't put into words. We watch the external, behavioral effects of these psychological conflicts as she interacts with her husband and children who themselves have also been affected. Which war she returns from is not stated, clearly intentionally to show the viewer that this is not important. There is little external drama in this quiet, sensitive demonstration of the powerful psychological forces stimulated by military service in war, both in the service member and in her family. Liza Johnson gives us a movie that shows us a fictional character and her life yet has in every scene a ring of truth. This is an artistic achievement.