Amdoc 2016: Thank You for Your Service
After a fine sunday 6 hour excursion that included the town of Coacherella, that hosts a music festival every year but on this sunday mostly looked like the most deserted place on earth, with some great murals like the one that illustrates this post (made by Mac in 2014), it was back to American reality with the film ”Thank You for Your Service” by Tom Donahue, 88 minutes.
”The US military faces a mental health crisis of historic proportions”, says the first sentence of the catalogue text and indeed the film is a documentation of the fact that there are 22 suicides committed by war veterans – per day. 150.000 veterans took their lives after the Vietnam war. This film deals with the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, where 2.7 million served.
The film bombards you with information. Interview follow interview, psychiatrists, retired military generals and secretaries of
state talk, the filmmakers said afterwards that they had interviewed 240 people… The journalistic side, the collection of facts being conveyed is very well done, we get to know in details what is PTSD, but the question is whether the amount of information and the constant ”attack” of the sound score, with effects and music that makes me think of action movies, kill the overall story of the four fine characters, whose stories are touching emotionally. It is sooo good when the filmmakers let interview scenes stand without music, let the four talk, come out as interesting human beings for whom the wounds are fatal. When the filmmakers show respect for the audience and do not tell it what to feel in this specific scene. Again and again this is what differs an American documentary from a European, is it not?
The characters: Kenny, a family father, who became another person physically and in his mind was fighting with suicidal thoughts, Phil who also left his wife, Lu who is diagnosed with the PTSD ”moral injury” but has the guts to go visit a now living in the US Iraqi family , though he was part of a combat where the family’s father and two brothers were killed and William, married four times after serving… The film shows that healing programmes can work, if done in the right way and the message of this film is clear: Something has to be done to get more personel deal with mental health problems in the army.
The website below advocates for the creation of a Behavioral Health Corps (BHC), take a look and support, I will do so even if I have many doubts about the way this film is constructed.
