Tricky, timely subject matter is handled with an uncommon grace and psychological nuance by debuting director and screenwriter Liza Johnson in Return, so much so that one can't help but wish that Ms. Johnson took a few more chances with this story of an American soldier returning home after an extended tour. Settling into the malaise of lower-middle-class suburbia proves a strange and stressful ordeal for Kelli (Linda Cardellini) when her tour of duty comes to an end but the horrors of war, the burdens of full-time enlistment, and the weight of distance are invoked in inventive and subtle variations by Johnson, making Return one of the more admirable and satisfying war narratives to come out since The Hurt Locker.
Things begin stalely, as Kelli walks back into the loving embrace of her husband, Mike (Michael Shannon), their two daughters, and her job as a machine operator at a small factory. She hungrily undresses Mike in their cramped bathroom but feels uncomfortable and alienated with her girls at the local bar, even more so when she meets the comely red-haired woman who has been babysitting her girls while she was away. "Nothing happened" is how she responds when her friends ask her about her experiences but as she digresses and becomes even more uncomfortable in her skin, boozing and lashing out at her husband, it becomes clear that her time in the armed forces served a dark yet integral purpose in her life.
Johnson's script shrewdly errs on the side of ambiguity as to whether Kelli's troubling nerviness is a product of her tour of duty or the existential malaise that her days in the service settled momentarily. Within days of arriving home, she quits her job, separates from her husband, as a result of his infidelity, and gets picked up for drunk driving. At mandatory AA meetings, she strikes up a brief relationship with a fellow veteran (Mad Men's John Slattery), who sustains existence through snorts of crushed-up painkillers several times a day. And right when Mike starts a fight over custody, she receives news that she has been redeployed.
It's the brief glimpses of unsettling ordinariness -- ho-hum drug dependency, the joy of scoring a good plumbing job, the downsizing of a factory to two lone, lonely figures -- that gives Return it's real punch. There's also Cardellini's impressive performance, which keeps all the emotional and social tension at a steady boil. Even in her early days on Freaks and Geeks, Cardellini has had a certain mastery of aggravated exhaustion and here, perhaps more than any other time in her career, she seems consistently on the verge of giving in to complete delirium, or breaking down into intense manic depression.
It's a shame that Michael Shannon, a great actor, is relegated to the bland husband role, but if nothing else, it shows an ability to restrain his given talents for madness and furious, unkempt internal conflicts. Indeed, the most uninteresting thing about Return is that it is hampered with the rote drama of marital discord, which feels restrictive in a narrative that suggests boundless internal and external exploration. What Johnson is fascinated with here is not only what happens when our servicemen and servicewomen come home, but the internal struggle between wanting to protect the American way of life and their general disinterest in their own common, simple lives. Return may just be a snapshot of such issues, but it remains unique in its limited exploration of these largely unspoken concerns.
