'Home of the Brave'

[question everything]

Review by WSJ's Joe Morgenstern:

'Home of the Brave'

If there's a way to do justice to the story of American troops coming home from Iraq, "Home of the Brave" hasn't found it. Irwin Winkler's update of William Wyler's "The Best Years of Our Lives" starts well with the stirring spectacle of young men and women, members of a National Guard unit stationed south of Baghdad, struggling to do their duty in an alien land of unfathomable danger. Once they return, however, wounded physically or shattered spiritually, the film turns didactic, contrived and occasionally ludicrous. Exactly what, for example, are we to make of Jessica Biel as an amputee when the camera dwells, as it often does, on the stump of her digitally altered arm? That she sacrificed a hand for the sake of her role? I'm slightly sorry to be snide, but filling that role with a Hollywood beauty, however talented she may be, dishonors the memory of Harold Russell, the real-life double amputee of Wyler's peerless film. It's a fatuous choice that borders on farce.