Badland
Francesco Lucente
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Plot Summary
Jerry (Jamie Draven) was an idealist when he served in the first Gulf War. But when he was later deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, Jerry was an older man, a father of three and embittered by broken promises and unfulfilled desires. When Jerry returns from Iraq he has been transformed by horrors that cannot be forgiven. He lives a life of poverty, his children afraid of him and his wife, Nora (Vinessa Shaw), unsympathetic and unhappy. When Jerry discovers that Nora has betrayed him, his anger and despair drive him to commit an act so heinous and irreversible that nothing he has experienced in combat could have prepared him. Badland is a gut-wrenching, poignant look at the aftermath of war on a returning Iraq war veteran and his family. It is the story of a man who loses his soul and how a daughter's love and faith brings redemption to his unspeakable crimes.
Rotten Tomatoes Movie Reviews
TOMATOMETER
17%- Reviews Counted: 18
- Fresh: 3
- Rotten: 15
- Average Rating: 3.7/10
Top Critics' Reviews
Rotten: The raw material would seem to be in place for a strong, moving contemporary tragedy, but scene after endless scene fails to come to life.
Rotten: When the picture gets around to its calculated socko ending, the viewer has long been pummeled into a state of numbness.
Rotten: Badland practically begs 'For Your Consideration' without the substance to justify its awards-season epic length.
Rotten: Possibly the worst idea for a movie this century.
Customer Reviews
Amazing
Acting, production value, and most importantly story are OUTSTANDING. Best movie I've seen in a long time, worth the money. The messages it presents are important ones, just hang in there until the end. Don't stop watching because it's disturbing, make it to the credits and you'll be glad you did.
Clumsy and Heavy Handed with a Tired and Biased Agenda
On the surface, this film seemed as if it may have some promise. While the beginning was deeply disturbing, and setting a tone that made the lead character beyond redemption of any kind, the film devolves into overly melodramitic, poorly written schlock that is disappointing at best.
No fault to the actors, as they did the best they could with the material they were given, but were unable to carry the ackward dialogue and poorly constructed scripting. The writing was a mess.
Then there's the direction. With a runtime of 2:45, at least 75 minutes of this should have wound up on the cutting room floor. The film was filled with dry and often moody scenes with little dialgogue that failed to progress the overall storyline, and led to an overwhelming urge to fast forward through most of it, one I fought off, waiting for a payoff that never came.
The first two hours of the film seemed to be a heavy handed character study of PTSD, and the effect of war on the psyche of not only the soldiers who return home, but also the families they left behind while away, which in and of itself would have been a decent enough premise for the film (if not cliche), had the writer/director actually had any knowledge of this disorder.
Instead we are witness to a sophomoric vision, lacking any depth or understanding, and ultimately, an insult to any veteran who has served. The film portrays our service men and women as little better than thugs who remorselessly kill women and children, ordered by the evil military establishment, and who fight without any sense of direction.
While there is certainly room for intellectually honest debate and criticism of the effects of war, this kind of propoganda is offensive.
There are many good and substantive films that deal with this topic in a far more sensitive fashion without resorting to blatant inacuracies, stereotypes, and insults. Avoid this film. It's not even worth the rental fee.
Courageous and Important
I read the reviews and comments and found most of the negative ones to be extremely unfair and clearly biased. I thought I would post a fair and balanced
review from one of the most respected film critics in Europe...It says it all and better than I could...This film is truly a courageous and important film...
The Black Path of Fear
“Badland”, a coming home film drama by Francesco Lucente.
One enters virgin soil with this film, one enters unsafe ground in every respect. Up-front little has been heard about the almost three hours long indie film, which was co financed by German funds. The director Francesco Lucente is not well known, although he has done much, like a film about the life of the melancholic author of detective novels, Cornell Woolrich. You can recognize the faces of the young actors from other films and tv-series, but their names are not well known yet. The film “Badland” itself is something like a bizarre-poetic “vague terrain”. You are welcomed in a violent, melancholic badland of America, where not only the country is without end, but above all the sadness.
Young Jerry, personified with devotion by actor Jamie Draven, is coming home. He fought in the Iraq war and has been dishonourably dismissed from service after an obscure military action. From the desert of Iraq he returned into a Midwest wasteland. He has a job at a gas station in the middle of nowhere and lives in a shabby trailer with his three little children and his wife Nora, who is pregnant. The former soldier is now only “poor white trash”. The atmosphere at the station and in the trailer at home is toxic and petulant. At his job Jerry is wrongly accused of stealing gasoline. At home a lot of quarrelling is going on because of shortage of money, also because Jerry is suffering from depression. Although there is a beautiful scene between Jerry and his wife – their hands touch each other with caution and tenderness – there can be no possibility to save the family. They have pale faces, as if they sense death coming.
When Jerry feels deceived by his wife, he explodes in a nightmare sequence – as terrible as Bunuel’s cut through the eye in “An Andalusian dog”. Within seconds, Jerry snuffs out the life of his wife and of his boys. Only his daughter survives, with whom he has a very special relationship. The war seems to have returned to America like a virus, a massacre takes place in the heartland of the USA.
An act which ends everything, all hopes, all chances, actually also all films. Although “Badland” did just start. And also Jerry actually is starting again, with his daughter Celina, whom he had spared, he is fleeing to Wyoming. A restart, which never can take place. Maybe one can imagine, this Wyoming is a country after death, a purgatory of emptiness flooded by sun. Jerry’s mostly red eyes are weird dead centres in an eternal boyish face.
In a forgotten small town Jerry and Celina take lodgings in a motel. The girl hides in the room, Jerry starts working in a café. In the best classic American narrative tradition, Lucente develops this restart without any chance. The sad ballads of Bruce Springsteen and Ray Lamontage, used a little bit too intensely, give this passage an elegiac atmosphere. Lucente is no a disciplined stylist like Terrence Malick, who once made with “Badlands” a film with a confusable title and similar tenor. Lucente is an unrestrained desperate romantic: the pictures of Jerry and his daughter in the small town, they remind us of Edward Hopper – without being protected by the night.
Maybe the weakest scenes in the film are when Jerry is confronted with the alcoholic town sheriff, who also fought in Iraq. The disruption or deformation of American masculinity, theme of so many coming home films from Houston’s “Let there be light” until “Taxi Driver” or “Rambo” is overdone.
But one must be careful with “Badland”: such a desperate showdown, which attacks even the last innocence of film, has rarely be seen in cinema. Lucente knows, that he is going far. But you have to go too far, if you want to pull the rug out from under the feet of the viewer – in a film about the experience of war, about the experience of death.
Hans Schifferle in: Sueddeutsche Zeitung May 14th, 2008 (A.K.)
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