So it was last Thursday that I, along with a few other military organizations came to meet for a viewing of the upcoming movie “Lifted.” Because the director was a noted Hollywood liberal, I was not really sure what I was about to see.

In this ever polarized environment we live in today, it is rare to find a movie about the War on Terror that takes both a decided anti-war theme, but yet gives supporters of the conflict a chance to feel pride in the way a boy and his family overcome the struggles of deployment.

Such a movie will hopefully be in a multiplex near you very soon. That movie is “Lifted.”

Written and directed by Academy Award-nominated director Lexi Alexander, “Lifted” stars talented twelve-year-old Uriah Shelton in his movie debut. The movie takes place and was filmed on location in rural Alabama.

The plot revolves around Henry Matthews, played by Shelton, as an exceptionally talented young R& B singer, whose happy family life is disrupted when his father, a Marine, is re-deployed to Afghanistan and, despite all the obstacles including losing the family home and being forced to move in with his grandfather who hates his music, is inspired to enter a teen singing competition in the hopes of winning and escaping a world that is falling apart.

As you watch the movie unfold, you look at it in two ways: first is the technical side in which Alexander shoots the timeline of the fathers deployment, his mothers struggles with drug addiction, and the torment of Henry as an outcast in school and at home, and second the story itself and the overall feeling one takes away at the end of the movie with a plot twist that leaves you raw with emotion.

The movie is centered in the relationship between father and son and the music they create together. The father, played by Dash Mihok (”The Good Wife”), provides the freestyle routines that help give the movie its soul.

Others appearing in the movie include; Todd Simpson, former American Idol winner Ruben Studdard, country singer Trace Adkins and former MTV DJ Alan Hunter as himself.

At the end, one is left with a family struggling with drug addiction, unemployment, losing their family home, a boy’s dream, and the father’s deployment overseas. While you can say that there are a few issues with certain points in the way the plot unfolds (a scene with Studdard and the mother looking for Henry comes to mind), you are ultimately left with an emotional experience of a boy and his father and the bond they share.

In all my time dealing with wounded troops and the issues of deployment, the strain on the family, the overcoming of obstacles, and the idea that hope exists, this film does the best job of trying to capture all of it in 90 minutes and I hope you will soon be LIFTED….

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Spencer Treat Clark plays Nick, the young filmmaker and Dash Mihok plays Ben, the wounded veteran. Ben was a reservist, never intended to be on the front lines. He was injured on a patrol in Iraq, when his jeep was taken out by a bomb planted in a dead dog. He blames himself for not figuring out the trap, and has survivor’s guilt combined with PTSD and depression from being left by his wife while he was deployed as well as guilt for a tragic accident. So basically, this is a perfect recipe for being messed up.

Nick meanwhile, video tapes his ex-girlfriend’s dance rehearsals, and his unresolved emotions come through without being said just as Ben’s issues emerge through action and reaction to stimuli. The dance scenes are a silent counter-point to the story of the two men’s slow-burn friendship.

Moments of emotional breakthrough emerge at seemingly random intervals, with several traumatic flashbacks where Ben believes himself back in Iraq. Other moments come from Kelly, a fellow soldier in the VA meetings who rants about how her injuries have made her unattractive to her husband. In one scene in the woods outside the country home which is the film’s primary set, a pine cone is equated to a mine, as Ben delivers an expose into the feeling of paranoia that developed while on patrol.

Some of the shots are from third-person traditional camera angles, and some are first-person handheld, as recorded by Nick’s camera. The doc-within-a-film quality allows for shaky focus and zooms when one of the characters in filming, which adds a raw quality to many of the more emotional shots. There are a number of sequences comprised of seemingly unrelated shots, shifting in and out of focus, shots of the woods around the house, cutting back and forth with little regard to cotinuity. The pseudo-documentary is intermittent, mediating several of the scenes of emotional breakthrough—Nick’s presence is notable because of cutting back and forth between cameraman first-person perspective shots and more traditional third person shots.

Narratively, I found the ending lacking as far as characterization, even if it was emotionally true to what happened leading up to the end. Without a meta-textual or self-referential quality, the ending might have been much more of a disappointment, a frustrating violation of narrative expectations.

There have been a number of anti-war films about veterans of the second Gulf War and US military action in Afghanistan, but Superheroes is notable for being a quiet, self-contained work that is skillfully understated, with powerful performances, especially from Dash Mihok as the wounded warrior. In the commentary, writer/director Alan Brown mentions that some of the initial response to the film concept was that even in 2005, the topic had already become passé for Hollywood, though we’ve seen another wave of such films in the last couple of years (including Brothers, The Hurt Locker, and Dear John).

The DVD includes a commentary track by Alan Brown and Dash Mihok. Alan talks about casting the two leading men, including Alan and Dash relating the story of their conversations that lead into Dash coming on to the project. Alan also discusses the short shooting schedule, the editing, Dash’s process in preparing for the role, the reason for the dance scenes’ inclusion in the film (the dance rehearsals were originally a larger part of the story, but was cut down to being a Greek Chorus-style series of interludes to comment on the main plot without words).

Source: popmatters.com

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