Return

"This is just a giant waste of time. I can't do it anymore." After Kelli (Cardellini) returns home from the war she finds it much harder to adjust then expected. Finding life mundane and pointless she begins to drift. When her husband Mike (Shannon) leaves with the kids she is forced to deal with her problem. There have been many, many movies made about problems returning soldiers experience when trying to adjust to day-to-day life. "Home Of The Brave" is one of the more recent great ones. Like that movie this one deals with how she feels that life is so mundane and boring it begins to affect her relationships with others. The main problem with this one is that it seems to take forever to go anywhere. The acting is great and the story is good but again it is very slow and sometimes hard to stay interested in. I would compare this to the recent "Take Shelter" movie in its pacing and feel. If you liked that movie you will probably like this one too. Overall, a very OK movie that could have been better. I give it a B-.

Let me start by saying that I love Linda Cardellini, after watching Freaks and Geeks recently I thought I would watch this to see what she was up to. As I expected, Linda did a fantastic job acting and stole the show, unfortunately, the character who Linda plays is about as inspirational as a dead horse.

This movie is painfully and relentlessly depressing, there's no feel good movie here, there's no optimism behind the horizon. Quite frankly, the only reason i would recommend this movie is for a parent to scare their child out of joining the military.

All the acting is quite good, in fact, it's chillingly realistic, but the slow pace, depressing theme with no reward, and them turning Linda Cardellini into a monster don't fly in my book.

I can't say I've been wowed by this movie. Not everything was negative though, the acting was quite good, the story not so much. I get it's a drama and there is not a lot of action involved, and that doesn't really matter, but at one point you have to go somewhere with your story, but in this movie there isn't really an ending, or at least not a satisfying ending. It's too bad the story wasn't better because the whole cast was good. A woman suffering of post traumatic stress syndrom returning to her former life where she doesn't seem to fit in anymore, it's good material but to me it felt bland and unfinished. A missed opportunity.

RETURN (dir. Liza Johnson) Linda Cardellini delivers a mesmerizing performance as a woman who returns from a tour of duty in Iraq to find that her old life no longer fits. The film is deliberately and ominously paced as she discovers the truth about her prior existence. Her job is 'a waste of time' (it is, and it was), and her husband seems to have replaced her with an 'angst free' woman. It's not so much that Iraq had changed Kelli, but more that she now realizes that life can be so much more than what is offered in her rural, small town existence. Her friends and family members think that she might have seen devastating or particularly grisly scenes of carnage, yet her most unsettling memory seems to be witnessing a jet plane completely filled with rubber gloves. Her biggest and unstated realization is how shallow and pointless all of their lives really are. When things seem like they cannot get any worse, her husband initiates a custody battle over their two young daughters, and then she learns that she has been redeployed. The film is a stark and heartbreaking portrait of a woman who has been placed in a devastatingly untenable position. MUST SEE.

Return is ultimately about the inner turmoil that a woman has on her return from her tour of duty. It's nothing incredibly original, but it's written and directed with enough sensibility and delicacy, and a woman being at the front and center may be something different for viewers. It works because it's never emotionally contrived and it never comes off as anything other than heartfelt and personal. What makes this as effective as it was were the performances. The entire supporting cast does some really solid work, but the praise belongs to Linda Cardellini, who gives a wonderfully understated and subtle performance. It's in her silent moments that she resonates the most with the audience, and she absolutely deserves a lot more mentions. She's either on par or better than several of the actresses in contention for awards. This is highly recommended because it deserves to put Cardellini on the spotlight, and I can only hope this gets seen enough in the upcoming months and as a result it gives her more career opportunities.