An eye opens in the first shot of Oren Moverman's directorial debut The Messenger. It belongs to Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) who has recently come home from duty with an injury that causes pain and problems with his sight. His ex-girlfriend Kelly (Jena Malone) has a new, kind fiancé but that doesn't stop her from giving Will a military-grade bone-jumping to welcome him home. But it is an act as detached from her new life as the pulse of common life is from Will.

The eye opening and its continued impairments are blatant metaphors, but ones worn with ease rather than insistence as Will becomes the heir to the worst job in the armed forces. Under the tutelage of Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson), he has to deliver notifications of KIA (killed in action), the kind that Kelly never had to receive. He is thus forced to repeatedly live through the horror and guilt that his notification would have brought -- or, just maybe, ponder the absence of such emotions in his case. The rules are simple and direct: No touching to console, deliver the news only to the next of kin, and stick to the script.

Needless to say, the first several families don't take the horrible news well. Then, however, Stone and Will meet Olivia Pitterson (Samantha Morton), an oddly understanding and kind widow with a young son who receives the news calmly. Stone ascribes this to the fact that she's probably taken up with another man. But Will is intrigued and begins to look in on her. She reciprocates fondly, if shyly. Where so many other films become unhinged with the introduction of a love interest, Moverman's film masterfully leaves the relationship undefined and brooding. Olivia does not exist to show another side of Will or as a cathartic blow horn; she is a true woman, drawn beautifully by Moverman and co-writer Alessandro Camon and brought to vivid, honest life by the hypnotic Morton.

It is when Olivia leaves that the film seems to lose its focus and bracing emotional core. Perhaps to ease the raw nerves so realistically provoked by the film's triumphant first half, Moverman offers respite in the relationship between Stone and Will in the second half. But he can't quite control the tremendous emotions he's handling without the narrative anchors of the notifications and Olivia. The second half of the film offers a dubious arrangement of scenes -- some strong, others not so much -- leading to a predictable, though carefully handled, ending.

Nevertheless, Harrelson and Foster's performances as the grieving shadows of the military casualties of Iraq manage to hold the film together. This pairing offers a pungent irony, however: After years of galvanizing otherwise mediocre films in supporting roles (3:10 to Yuma, Alpha Dog), the immensely talented Foster consistently finds himself upstaged by Harrelson in one of the most restrained and instinctive roles of his prolific career. As the lonely, complex and friendly Stone, Harrelson evokes the experience of The Messenger as sturdily as a freshly pinned medal of valor.



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