Movie Review: Vet wants to find a dead comrade “A Place in the Field”

Veteran takes a road trip for “one last mission” is such a common plot that such missions have included not just visiting a fellow soldier or a fallen comrade’s family, but Channing Tatum playing a soldier delivering a service “Dog.”

As a genre, it’s been around so long Henry Winkler and Sally Field did a version of a PTSD trek (“Heroes”) in the ’70s, before “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” became the replacement name for “combat fatigue.” And the veterans depicted on the road in such films have included service members from every conflict since World War II.

The challenge is in showing us something new in this narrative, a challenge that the somber, sometimes soulful and always-over-familiar “A Place in the Field” fails to adequately answer.

Whatever “fresh take” viewers want in such stories, you have to figure the survivors of combat — veterans themselves — deserve something more than a “triggered” flashback-littered tale of a couple of not-that-close “comrades” driving and hitching from Texas to California to scatter the ashes of a traumatized member of their company who took his own life after coming back home.

Veteran bit player Dom DiPetto plays Giovanni “Gio” Scuderi, a sticks-to-himself carpenter in rural Texas. He’s got steady work and a doctor girlfriend (Mishel Prada) way above his pay grade, a beautiful woman who frets over the stretches where he doesn’t answer his phone.

A bad day for Gio begins when he hits a coyote on the road. He buries it and pays tribute with a ritual howl. That’s the day the package comes, one with a letter and an urn. A former comrade of “I wouldn’t be here if it wsn’t for him” caliber came home, couldn’t adjust or tamp down his demons, and killed himself.

“Don’t grieve for me, brother,” he wrote. “Don’t freak out at the ashes.”

Gio has a mission, and another veteran of their outfit (Khorri Ellis, with DiPetta a credited co-writer of the script) shows up for a ride along.

The way stations on this pilgrimage will include the inevitable breakdown, a fellow veteran who picks them up in his RV, a stop at an artsy “hippy” compound where a dancer will interpret your poem for you, when you’re ready to recite it and the like.

Back in uniform, the burly (now bearded) Gio was “The Tank.” But this won’t be a tale of miles and reminiscences. Their combat experience — it’s not crystal clear where they served, a fact not helped by the obviously non-Middle-Eastern locations where they filmed this — is something Gio only revisits in abrupt flashbacks that could be triggered by a noise, a situation that resembles similar parked-beside-the-road moments in “in country,” or a phrase.

“I got you, bro,” from helpful Ashlee (Ashlee Brian) in his RV is all it takes to set Gio off.

The performances aren’t bad, just somewhat uninspired and generally uninteresting. The players look like the veterans a lot of us know, even if there’s little in the screenplay that lets them give away that status in their speech and actions. A boot camp marching chant here, a “Better to walk than to be dragged” remark there will have to do.

Occasional “soulful” moments sneak into the screenplay, which has a script-by-committee feel. The coyote metaphor is a nice if obvious touch. An out-of-left-field anecdote giving us the legend of White Sands’ Pavla Blanca — sort of acted-out and clumsily “related” to the story — stands outs as more indulgent than anything else we see here. The combat recreations are convincing enough, but just cliches when you break down what they say and why they’re in the script.

Any movie that sets out to engender sympathy for people who survived situations most of us will never face has good intentions. But not all of them are created equal, and “A Place in the Field” is as generic as its title.

A somnambulant pace that lacks anything like urgency and a half-hearted grasp of the pathos first-time feature director Nikki Mejia should have been going for parks this veterans on the road picture on the shoulder, never close to getting up to speed.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast:Don DiPetta, Khorri Ellis, Mishel Prada, Ashlee Brian and Xochitl Portillo

Credits: Directed by Nikki Mejia, scripted by Bluesman del Vecchio,
Don DiPetta, Khorri Ellis and Xochitl Portillo. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:23

About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine
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