In a year of sorry national spectacles, none seems more bitter or pointless than the feud that broke out last month between the Trump administration and the family of Sergeant La David Johnson, one of four U.S. soldiers killed in Niger during an ambush by Islamist militants. The president’s clumsy handling of a condolence call to Johnson’s widow, the unprincipled disclosure of his words to the media by U.S. congresswoman Frederica Wilson, the false charges leveled against Wilson by White House chief of staff John Kelly, the congresswoman’s gratuitous accusation of racism as a factor in the administration’s actions—no one emerged unsullied from the conflict, in which Johnson’s sacrifice for his country was steadily obscured by bickering over who had dishonored his memory.
Such is the case with 28-year-old Adam Schumann of Junction City, Kansas, whose experience provides Finkel with his sturdiest plotline. Two years after having returned from a third tour of duty as a victim of combat stress, Schumann accidentally lets his baby son roll off a bed onto the floor, and the sense of having let someone down triggers feelings of guilt and worthlessness over the death of another soldier who took his place on a patrol. Schumann and his wife, Saskia, argue endlessly; eventually she discovers him in their basement furnace room with the barrel of a shotgun under his chin, and spends an eternity begging him to surrender the gun before the baby’s cry from the floor above jolts Adam from his tunnel vision. Following this incident, Adam wins admission to the Pathway Home, an independent treatment facility located on the grounds of the California Veterans Home, and the rest of the book turns on whether he can banish his demons before his overburdened wife finally walks out on him.
The biggest difficulty in dramatizing Finkel’s book is the sense of anticlimax at the end—though Adam Schumann finally begins to work through his emotional issues at the Pathway Home, Finkel is too honest to suggest that his struggle will ever really end. Unfortunately Hall addresses this narrative challenge by lopping off the last chapter of the Schumanns’ story: the movie ends shortly after Adam confesses to war widow Amanda Doster (a woebegone Amy Schumer) that her late husband died taking his place on patrol, and she responds by ordering him to get better. (“You live!” she insists. “That’s how you honor him.”) This might feel more conclusive than Finkel’s ending, but it smacks of self-help literature (in which half the battle is admitting you’ve got a problem) and Hollywood corn (like an old social drama whose final credit reads not “The End” but “The Beginning”).
Directed by Jason Hall
