"We're just there for notification, not God, not heaven."—Captain Tony Stone

Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) is unwilling to wrap his mind around about his latest, stateside assignment, to notify the next-of-kin that their loved one who was serving in the military has died. While he doesn't have any faith background or training in counseling, he's thrown into a new kind of fire, and his only training is to shadow a more experienced member of the Casualty Notification, Capt. Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson). And he's off to "battle" the forces of grief, despair, and loss, which proves to be a harder test than anything he's come up against in Iraq or otherwise.

Montgomery's character is what gets him chosen for this new task, and the audience knows he's just finished his latest round of sexual escapades with his best friend's girl, Kelly (Jena Malone), which doesn't make him the picture of personal integrity. But the pairing with Stone will either make him or break him, and the rules, to be clear that is death not loss, deserting, or anything else, and to never touch the next-of-kin, are ones we can be sure he'll soon break.

"I guess one way or another, we're all God's children."—Stone

What Montgomery finds is that his commanding officer/partner is addicted to drugs, just like Montgomery. He finds that grief grabs people differently, but that it rips them all apart no matter how they receive the news. He discovers that his uniform makes him a target for people who are grieving, for people who resent the military, and for people who just don't understand, regardless of what he personally may have done while serving his country abroad. He also begins to see that while he hates his new orders, he's quite good at it, and Foster's dismantling of a small town cop who hassles them is priceless.

When Montgomery finds himself attracted to Olivia Pitterson (Samantha Morton), everything in his perfectly (on the outside) placed life starts to get way more complicated. And not just because Pitterson has a child. No, it's more complicated because Olivia is the widow of a soldier blown up in the Middle East who must now explain the loss of her husband and father to her son. But attraction is a funny thing, and the strange, mixed-up vibe that emanates from war covers this whole movie. It's not like it infiltrates the movie; it's more like the bloodstains are real, the very core of the movie covered over by human ash and remains.

"It smelled of rage, of fear. Of the man who he had become over there. He didn't treat me or his little boy the way he should. So, to me, in my mind, it was like he was dead already."—Olivia

This movie uses the premise of delivering the news to get inside your head (it's an awful job) but this is about the way that our minds, our hearts, and our perceptions are all screwed up when war is involved. Whether you've seen The Hurt Locker or Brothers, or the more glamorized The Kingdom, you've seen some of the ways that Hollywood has revealed a side of the Iraq war different from what we see on the news. Stone proclaims that all of the funerals should be on television, but part of that is about his belief that it would make his job easier. Really, all of the funerals should be on the news so we'd see how unglamorous war is, and how much each death costs, whether that person is known by one person or many.

And whether society wants to believe it or not, war changes people. And the people who come back alive come back with something different than what they left with. Experience changes you no matter what, but these young men and women returning from war deserve more help than they're getting in "re-entering" society. It's like (in a bad analogy) the NFL linebacker trained, prepared, and ordered to hurt people on the field who then crashes into society with violent tendencies and runs against the grain of what's acceptable. The correlation of the re-entry by soldiers isn't terribly different; they're prepared for one thing while abroad or on duty, and then thrown back into a world that looks completely different.

Thanks to the folks at Oscilloscope, I was hooked up with a DVD/Blu-ray combo package that presented very well, and included special features like "Notification" (a documentary about the Casualty Notification duties), "Going Home," and a set of Q & A that put actors and writers on the hot seat.