“You kids can’t know what it’s like for us parents, just waiting and waiting for our little boy to come home,” says Annie (Laura Dern) towards the end of Bravetown. Her reflection sums up the film’s focus on the difficulties of life after war. The image also reflects us, as we also wait, anticipating that the movie might sort out its confusions.
These begin with an abundance of themes and ideas, as Bravetown splices together focuses on war and motherhood, filtered through a teenage celebrity DJ who makes over the high school dance team. Trying to do too many things, Bravetown fails to deliver the superficial pleasures of a teen dance movie. The kids go through generic motions — performing stylized prop-focused set pieces — while the film relegates its most interesting narratives and characters to the margins.
The plot focuses on a New York teenager Josh (Lucas Till), sent to stay with his estranged father (Tom Everett Scott) and attend court-mandated counseling with therapist Alex (Josh Duhamel) in a military town in North Dakota, following an accidental drug overdose. While Footloose clones duly follow an escapist aesthetic, Bravetown begins with a grimmer look, its images of an underground club and Josh’s seedy apartment underlining another sort of contrivance rather than becoming lost in Kenny Loggins’ cheerful fantasy. If Josh sees North Dakota as a prison to contain adolescent energies, the film itself indulges in another stereotype, presenting North Dakota as the antidote to the urban alienation and pill-popping temptations of NYC.
This antidote is called Paragon, and here people don’t talk about the departed, but “like to pretend their loved ones are still alive”, as one resident says. But if Paragon has the potential to be a space of hidden secrets and meaningful silences, instead it’s merely depopulated. Apart from a couple of kids playing with toy guns as Josh’s bus rolls into town, the streets are generally empty.
Rather than a rich range of individuals (or even character types) or an evocative setting, the film relies on some literal signs to indicate Paragon’s investment in war. The camera pans significantly past the Armed Forces Recruitment Center a few times and takes in the army recruitment posters at Paragon High School. Symbols are decked out for interpretation, notably a picturesque tree hung with hundreds of military medals, illuminated by lanterns at opportune moments so that locals can simulate emotional responses we might share. Other prompts, equally heavyhanded, run the short gamut from sunrise and mist to sentimental music.
The primary symbol, of course, is Josh, in place to offer hope to this sad town, where “Life Hurts”, as the film’s poster puts it. But Josh has his own war fixation. As he obsessively watches Oliver Stone’s Platoon, we see Willem Dafoe’s memorable death scene and Charlie Sheen’s philosophizing from the helicopter as he leaves Vietnam. Platoon becomes Bravetown‘s intertext, framing the therapist’s platitude, “You don’t have to live the war to be at war.”
In Tangled Memories, Marita Sturken argues that the catharthis achieved for Platoon’s filmmakers and audiences depends on a mode of cultural reenactment that dehistorizes the war in Vietnam. Bravetown’s reenactment of a reenactment mixes Platoon and Miss Saigon to produce a piece of grotesque musical spectacle that, unbelievably, “heals” the folks at the dance while erasing any specificities concerning US experiences in Vietnam or, for that matter, Iraq and Afghanistan. Here the dancers and the spectators confront a mediated version of death, and with that, all will be well.
And yet. As much as its silliness might make us cringe and worry, we’re also offered Laura Dern as the bereft mother, Annie. She doesn’t appear until almost 40 minutes into Bravetown, but her distinctive authenticity in four brief scenes goes some way to redeeming the film. Augmenting her 2014 title as “Movie Mother of the Year” for her roles in Wild and The Fault in Our Stars, here Dern brings her mobile, expressive face and frame to a film in much more need of help. She helps us to recognize Annie’s clumsy attempts to make breakfast for her kids, her long fingers tracing her dead son’s features in photo albums like a blind person reading Braille, and the unbearable restraint of her lament, “I miss my boy” in the presence of her surviving children. These are the details of Annie’s scenography of waiting. She’s a complex character who allows us some insight into the post-traumatic stress of a grieving parent.
Bravetown focuses our empathy for Annie through Josh’s challenge to her daughter Mary (Kherington Payne): “Why are you so hard on her? She just misses her son.” But Josh’s own mother gets short shift. Although it was his father who walked out on them, Josh and his dad bond after their 17-year estrangement, despite an awkward beginning. On the other hand, everyone seems to agree that he was badly treated by his mother. As he tells Alex, “I always knew I didn’t matter to her.” In an early scene, we’ve witnessed Josh’s unnamed mum (Maria Bello) assert, in a fit of irritation, that she didn’t want him to be born. This single statement brands her as the story’s “bad guy”, even though the opening scenes have shown us a working mother with her own issues whose been desperately trying to keep things together for seventeen years.
Colluding with Josh’s narcissistic fiction of abandonment, Bravetown seems to endorse his decision not to call his mother or talk about her. Despite this narrative of forgetting, Bello’s performance lingers. I imagine, at last, she’s still waiting for her boy to come home.