By Duane Byrge (January 26, 2008)
PARK CITY — Clay Usay is one helluva a salesman. A Sergeant First Class in the U.S. Army, Usay inspires young men and women to sign up for duty, even with the sword of Iraq clearly over their heads. A comprehensive, even-keeled depiction of today’s recruiting process, “An American Soldier” brims with insight and drops us on the domestic front-lines of our military.
Like documentary masters such as Frederick Wiseman, filmmaker Edet Belzberg pierces the armor of a powerful institution by smartly letting her camera capture what is going on. Devoid of any political slants, “An American Soldier” is an even-handed, complex portrait of, as Walter Cronkite might have said, the way it is.
In this wayward situation — five years into a war with Iraq — the U.S. Army faces daunting challenges in securing troops. Nonetheless, recruiter Sgt. First Class Usay scores winning numbers. In this smack-dab into the middle of things, we see Usay up close and personal. An engaging and neighborly man, Usay trolls the low-waters of Houma, La., (just east of New Orleans) for able bodies. Like most successful professionals, Usay believes in what he is doing. A family man of decency and bravery, Usay is a soldier in the finest sense. He’s been battle-tested, and has bravely served in harms-way. His straight-shooting candor attracts teens to him. As we see, many of those receptive to his pitch are from troubled homes and don’t expect much out of life.
This red-white-and-blue military man raises their spirits and builds their confidence. In extolling the Army benefits, soldier Usay inspires these young people that the Army truly offers the best chance for being all they can be. Usay bonds with his young charges, and, as often as not, serves as a big-brother/father-figure. Clearly, he instills that the U.S. Army is family.
Tracing three of Usay’s recruits from sign-up through basic training, filmmaker Edet Belzberg conveys the recruits’ innocence. We see their inspirations and their disillusionments. And, we feel their fears. That’s the power of “An American Soldier,” we seemingly walk in their boots. No mere political tract, “An American Soldier” scopes its sights on the human side, and thus clarifies a troubling and complex process.
By John Anderson (January 18, 2008)
Kindness is not usually a quality associated with political documentaries, but it may be precisely what rescues Edet Belzberg’s insightful, absorbing film about military recruitment from being shipped off to a desert of indifference. A portrait of a crack Army recruiter and several of the oh-so-young people he convinces to join the service, “An American Soldier” doesn’t pander or judge, and as such will make itself palatable to a much wider audience than a war doc might otherwise. Theatrical prospects may be limited, but resonance should be far-reaching.
The most overtly critical aspect of Belzberg’s film is also its opening salvo — a survey of farmland and factories, dilapidated housing and rural disorder, implying what the movie then comes out and says: that a disproportionate number of people serving and dying in Iraq come from small-town southern America. How they get there, rather than why, is the point of “An American Soldier.” It’s a film about process: the seduction process.
In what becomes an unavoidable allusion to the Maysles brothers’ “Salesman,” Belzberg present Sgt. 1st Class Clay Usie, one of the Army’s most productive recruiters and a true believer (“I go out and look for patriots,” he says). He may be a huckster, but he’s convinced himself, too. Embodying a certain macho perfection, from his posture to his gung-ho attitude, he gives impressionable, unmolded Louisiana boys something to aspire to, partly because he’s so invested himself: During a college-prep night at the local high school, 90% of the parents leave before Usie can deliver his Army-is-the-answer speech. He looks genuinely hurt.
Usie also gets much more deeply involved with his charges — Belzberg focuses on a handful: Matt, Chris, Bobby and Lauren — than one might expect. He coaxes and cajoles the overweight Chris through a required two-mile run; he serves as best man at Matt’s wedding, after Matt enlists. He attends a memorial service for soldiers he’s indirectly sent to Iraq, maintaining his pro-mission stance and trying to comfort the grieving. What we see, as Belzberg moves away from enlistment to the rigors of boot camp — where things are hardly as rosy as Usie has implicitly made them out to be — is the betrayal inherent in the recruitment system.
“American Soldier” isn’t a particularly good-looking movie; the HD camera work being more serviceable than aesthetic, but the editing by Chad Beck and Adam Bolt is fluid and Belzberg’s sense of storytelling is sound. A far superior film to her much-lauded “Children Underground,” “Soldier” regards Usie with enormous respect and treats the kids — who could have been made to look ignorant, deluded or needy — as simply young, awkward and unformed. She lets others deliver the bad news: “The most precious thing we give our country is our children, sometimes,” says Bobby’s father, who is opposed to his son’s enlistment. Belzberg’s film is about how parents become reluctant donors, and how the fodder of war marches off of its own accord.
January 19, 2008
For all the talk about putting a “human face” on the war in Iraq, there may be no better vehicle than The Recruiter, the devastating new documentary from director Edet Belzburg. Shot in Houma, Lousiana, over a period of nine months, the film follows Sergeant First Class Clay Usie — a charismatic recruiter struggling in the face of nationwide opposition to the war — as well as four of his teenage recruits. When the regretful father of one of those recruits notes that “old men start wars, young men fight them,” he’s only scratching at the surface of the dramatic inequality on display here. Though our Yale-educated, Connecticut-born president claims to be a man of the people, it’s hard to imagine a single way he could relate to the poor, struggling residents of Houma, who see joining the military as their only way out of poverty.
Four, in particular, are profiled. Matt (a young Kevin Federline lookalike) wants to join the military to prove he’ll never be like the alcoholic father who abandoned him, while David is an overweight teenager who can barely run two miles but, like Matt, idolizes Sgt. Usie — the sort of encouraging father figure these boys never had. Meanwhile, honor student Bobby enters the military so overqualified that his recruiters can barely believe their luck, but Slipknot-loving lesbian Lauren bristles at her military-enforced makeover. For Lauren, the military is her only ticket to college, and this budding artist will do anything to get there — until she runs up against the very real conflicts of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
To watch these young people of seventeen and eighteen grapple with the enormity of their decisions — and their looming, inevitable stints in Iraq — inspires dread, not patriotism. As Matt prepares to leave his single mom and Sgt. Usie behind to begin training, his placid face contorts, trying to hold back unfamiliar tears. These are teenagers who barely understand their own emotions, let alone the war they are being shipped off to fight and die for. When four Louisiana National Guardsmen perish in Iraq, Usie attends the funeral and begins to recruit the pre-teen brother of one of the dead. For Usie, who is fighting against record-low recruiting levels, there is no other choice. Sadly, for the young boy with no prospects in run-down Houma, there may be no other option, either.
