An American Soldier
**/****
directed by Edet Belzberg
by Alex Jackson The Recruiter, which also goes by the moderately less forgettable title An American Soldier, is just another Sundance documentary, barely distinguishable from past efforts like The Ground Truth or Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. The film follows Army recruiter Sergeant First Class Clay Usie as he brings a new generation of soldiers to the front lines. Director Edet Belzberg's splintered narrative sees four recruits go off to boot camp, where they find themselves in way over their heads. Belzberg's thesis seems to be that these recruits are kids–unprepared for the real world, much less the United States Army–who join simply because they are unsure about their future and feel out of place in their families of origin. There's real warmth to Usie's interactions with his recruits. I particularly liked a scene where he coaches a shy, pudgy teenager on the required two-mile run by saying, "You don't even need to worry because I'm not going to let you fail." And I really liked fresh-out-of-high-school Lauren, a butch lesbian into drawing and Slipknot who complains that she's not learning anything in boot camp that will make her "smarter." There's a funny scene that kind of encompasses everything wonderful about puppy love where she holds up a picture of her girlfriend (a moody-looking, slightly Goth type) and proudly informs us, "That's my baby." Later, when she goes home, her mother tells her that in the "real world," you always have to work a job you hate and do things you don't want to, and maybe the Army is good for her if it teaches her to accept this. The subtle suggestion is that the Army doesn't work too well as a vehicle for social mobility, as it reinforces the passivity and blithe acceptance of your lot in life that perpetuates poverty. (Increasingly, I found myself wishing the film were about Lauren's experiences alone.) The Recruiter is ultimately a human story, but beneath this fairly broad Army recruitment topic, Belzberg obviously hopes to give it pseudo-political gravitas. Alas, the film doesn't have enough edge to work. I don't know if it necessarily needs less heart and more bile, but its failure to penetrate, agitate, or provoke renders it just one more digital video doc to add to the pile.
