Return (2011)

This movie is average and nothing special that would draw in a crowd. If your a movie buff and enjoy watching movies for the art and story this is a good one to watch. Acting was very good and draws you into her story and her life. The star of the movie Linda Cardellini really brings out the character and her emotions really show on screen. As you follow her throughout her life after she returns from tour, you get drawn into her life and the troubles she faces upon that return. Facing her past responsibility seems hard for her and hard to get back into the mom and wife routine causing many more issues as she struggles to trust her husband and take care of her children while adjusting to get her life back to the way it was before she left.

RETURN (dir. Liza Johnson) Linda Cardellini delivers a mesmerizing performance as a woman who returns from a tour of duty in Iraq to find that her old life no longer fits. The film is deliberately and ominously paced as she discovers the truth about her prior existence. Her job is 'a waste of time' (it is, and it was), and her husband seems to have replaced her with an 'angst free' woman. It's not so much that Iraq had changed Kelli, but more that she now realizes that life can be so much more than what is offered in her rural, small town existence. Her friends and family members think that she might have seen devastating or particularly grisly scenes of carnage, yet her most unsettling memory seems to be witnessing a jet plane completely filled with rubber gloves. Her biggest and unstated realization is how shallow and pointless all of their lives really are. When things seem like they cannot get any worse, her husband initiates a custody battle over their two young daughters, and then she learns that she has been redeployed. The film is a stark and heartbreaking portrait of a woman who has been placed in a devastatingly untenable position. MUST SEE.

Liza Johnson's film is a beautifully etched drama about a soldier's return from a tour of duty. The opening scenes of delight to be reunited with her husband and family are soon forgotten as the story concentrates on how Kelli, the returning soldier, must readjust to her role as mother and wife.One notable gift Ms Johnson has is her ability to hold a quiet contemplative interlude where Kelli is thoughtful and we are too. Pretty soon we get close to Kelli's mindset and how she works, and through this we get closer to all the other characters in her life. There is a lot of hard work put into many of the scenes in which Linda Cardellini (as Kelli) has to look at herself and others in what has fast become an alien environment. A driving under influence complicates things but then do so many of the events which unfold before us.The acting of Ms Cardellini is superb throughout playing a flawed character alongside so many others but trying to show her love of her children. Ways of changing her circumstances come and go and we see all sides of Kelli as they do. Michael Shannon is as good as he was in Shelter too.Not everyone will enjoy this film or even rate it, which is a pity. It is not obviously a film pitched at women, or anyone in particular, but it is a story loaded with emotion, profound arguments, prisms of perspectives, and a lot of thoughtful direction.I rate it very highly because we can see the hard work the artist has put into this work as we see it hanging in the gallery. One day perhaps it'll get the recognition it deserves. I recommend it.

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.