In the vein of Todd Haynes and Tony Kushner, Liza Johnson’s movie Return dramatizes an intimate, personal crisis to make intelligible a broader social catastrophe.
The plot is achingly simple: Kelli is a reservist who returns from war, loses her way, then her job, her car, her husband, her children and finally her freedom.
Why do these bad things happen to her? Time and again, Kelli is asked if something happened to her while she was at war. Each time she declines an easy answer, noting that nothing special happened to her over there. She has no story that would make sense of her confusion, her misfortunes or her increasingly reckless behavior.
And that’s the brilliant conceit of the movie: Kelli isn’t the only one who lacks a war story, it’s everyone around her – the audience included – who want for an explanation.
Through Kelli’s search for meaning, Johnson reminds us of the gaping holes in our grand narratives, from the missing weapons of mass destruction to the alleged benefits of creative destruction.
That the movie, like its protagonist, declines to provide an explanation for the circumstances that afflict its protagonists is to Johnson’s credit: that responsibility lies with us and the policies we support.