The War at Home Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		3.0
Audio		2.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

The War at Home Blu-ray Movie Review

Every Trauma Is Personal

Reviewed by Michael Reuben November 17, 2011

No one took it seriously when former Brat Packer Emilio Estevez began directing films, but having watched his brother Charlie Sheen squander greater opportunities and more durable public acceptance, one is forced to reevaluate the courage of Estevez' choices and the integrity with which he pursued them. His first film, Wisdom (1987), which he also wrote, was an unconvincingly melodramatic attempt to meld elements of Badlands, Bonnie and Clyde and, yes, Robin Hood, and it didn't work, not the least because Estevez and then-girlfriend Demi Moore still had too much St. Elmo's Fire baggage to be convincing as outlaws. Estevez then wrote and directed the comedy Men at Work (1990), co-starring with his younger brother Charlie. The film was hugely successful -- in Japan.

It was not until The War at Home (1996) that Estevez truly hit his stride as a director, and one reason was no doubt that he was able to gain objectivity by directing someone else's material, in this case an exceptional screenplay by James Duff, based on his play, Homefront. Duff, who today is best known for creating and overseeing the TV show The Closer, has a terrific ear for dialogue, especially the Southern variety heard in The War at Home. But he also has a knack for rooting drama in the particulars of this character and that time and place. The War at Home may be about a Vietnam veteran suffering from what is now called post traumatic stress disorder (or "PTSD"), but it isn't a tract about what war does to the people who fight it, or even about what Vietnam did to the Americans who got sent there. The film explores how one particular soldier, Jeremy Collier, experiences PTSD in a unique way determined by who he was before he left, and how his problems on return are as much a product of unresolved family conflicts that were there all along. War just made them impossible to keep buried.

The film was made for $3 million, and Estevez famously agreed with Disney to appear for free in yet another Mighty Ducks sequel in exchange for greenlighting The War at Home. Disney bankrolled the project, then released it in only six theaters, apparently lacking confidence that audiences would turn out for a serious drama. Not surprisingly, the film is also among the titles Disney has turned over to Mill Creek to release on Blu-ray.

During the week of Thanksgiving, 1972, the members of the Collier family, who live in a small town in Texas, are preparing for the holiday. Bob Collier (Martin Sheen), the head of the household, drives off to his car dealership for what will probably be a quiet day. Preparation for the holiday feast falls to Maurine (Kathy Bates), the garrulous and very traditional Baptist mother (she refuses to watch any more Ingrid Bergman films, because the actress left her husband for director Robert Rossellini -- 22 years earlier!). Maurine wants everything to be just so for the relatives who will be joining the family on Thursday, including the homemade peanut brittle she prepares as one of the desserts. It's a mark of the insight and authenticity of James Duff's writing that this batch of peanut brittle ends up assuming such outsized importance in the holiday's events, freighted by various family members with a weight of emotion that even the toughest confection could never support -- because that's what families do. They obsess about little things when they can't deal with the big ones.

The family's two children, Jeremy (Estevez) and his younger sister, Karen (Kimberly Williams), are finishing a short week at the local college, though Jeremy is barely attending. A decorated Vietnam vet, Jeremy's main reason for attending the two classes in which he's enrolled is to see Melissa (a very young Carla Gugino), his former girlfriend, who still cares for him but can't deal with the changed man whose letters from halfway around the world scared her. Before they leave campus for the holiday, Melissa asks him to drop the music appreciation class they share, because his very presence is making her nervous, and Jeremy agrees.

At least Melissa sees Jeremy as he is. His own family is unable (or unwilling) to see that he's fundamentally changed (although his father lets slip a word or two, here and there, that suggests a deeper understanding). "I know you have personal problems", Karen tells him. "I don't know the medical term, but I suppose you could describe it as being a terminal jerk!" And that's about as insightful as anyone in the house is willing to be. Told that war changes people, Maurine Collier replies, "War doesn't make you rude to your parents!" Indeed, Jeremy seems determined to ruin Maureen's Thanksgiving Day, taking every opportunity to provoke a confrontation. It's clear that this has been building for weeks, and that everyone in the Collier household has felt helpless to stop it -- except for Maurine, who's a virtuoso of denial. "You know it could be that he's waiting for someone to talk to him", she tells her husband. "Maybe", Bob replies, "but it's not us."

Like many combat veterans, Jeremy experiences flashbacks to his experiences on the battlefield, and the transitions between subjective memories and present reality are simply and artfully staged. But as the family collisions build to a crescendo, it becomes clear that these memories are not just random, but are intimately bound up with knots in the family relationships that have to be untangled, or at least acknowledged, before anyone can possibly move forward. It's this aspect of the story that gives the title, The War at Home, multiple meanings and makes the story resonate for the current age, when so many members of the armed forces are being diagnosed with PTSD. Duff's screenplay asks the difficult question -- and leaves the viewer to ponder it -- whether Jeremy's condition was caused by war or revealed by it. Its root is in his family, which is why, as Karen says in her introductory voiceover, his final battle has to be fought on an "unrecognized" front. Karen's voiceover also closes the film, and while her words offer a kind of blessing for Jeremy, there's no mention of the rest of the family.

The War at Home Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The cinematographer of The War at Home was Peter Levy, who had recently completed John Woo's Broken Arrow. If you've seen a lot of character-heavy dramas adapted from plays, you can appreciate how much effort Levy and Estevez invested to ensure that the camerawork never felt like it was recording performances on a stage. Camera position, framing and movement seem to have been more their concern than obtaining striking imagery. Particularly impressive is their use of in-camera transitions and judicious edits to achieve the Vietnam flashback sequences; a contemporary production probably wouldn't be able to resist doing something flashier and computer-aided.

The 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray falls in the middle range of transfers I've seen from Mill Creek, which means that it's adequate but nothing to get excited about. Having never seen the film theatrically, I can't offer any opinion on whether the flat, somewhat dull image is representative of the film's original look. Detail is certainly very good, if one examines the frame closely, with a natural-looking field of grain and no indication of any high-frequency filtering. Black levels appear somewhat attenuated, except in a few night scenes (especially flashbacks), and contrast often appears weak, but I suspect these are features of the original photography, such that any attempt to enhance them now in the transfer process would likely result in ringing, loss of detail or other undesirable side effects. As usual, Mill Creek has included no extras, which has made it easy to accommodate the film on a BD-25 without compression artifacts. The source material is reasonably well preserved, with only stray speckles and minor print damage.

The War at Home Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The soundtrack is presented as DTS-HD MA 2.0. Although the film was made and released in 1996 (and the Dolby Digital logo appears in the end credits), IMDb indicates that the original sound format was stereo, which would be consistent with the limited budget. In any case, except for the brief Vietnam sequences, there isn't anything in the film that would benefit substantially from a discrete 5.1 track, and in this presentation the Vietnam scenes achieve their sonic impact because of the strong contrast with the remainder of the film. The essential component of the soundtrack is screenwriter James Duff's intense, expressive dialogue, which is relieved at key moments with appropriately chosen, period-specific songs, primarily by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Additional, mournful underscoring has been suppied by the late Basil Poledouris (the original Conan the Barbarian, Robocop, The Hunt for Red October).

The War at Home Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

None.

The War at Home Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It's not easy to make a good drama. It's even harder to get the modern Hollywood system to pay for it, because, let's face it, it's no longer what they do (and it wasn't in 1996). That Estevez managed to work the system to make something as good, enduring and still relevant as The War at Home is an impressive achievement. The Blu-ray is eminently watchable and, at Mill Creek's price point, highly recommended.