Review Summary
At one point in “The Messenger” a soldier, just back from an overseas tour of duty, is telling a story during a welcome-home party with some friends. It starts out as a funny reminiscence of a local character he knew in Iraq, but when the anecdote takes a gruesome turn, the laughter is replaced by uncomfortable silence. Nobody gets the point of what he’s saying, or maybe nobody wants to hear it, and the happy mood of the reunion fractures. That soldier is not one of the main characters in this movie, Oren Moverman’s sober and satisfying drama. He disappears after that one scene, having emphasized one of the film’s central insights. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have created a fissure in American society, a split that is not political but rather experiential — between the people who have been directly affected and those who have not. — A. O. Scott, The New York Times
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