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THE DRY LAND Send This Review to a Friend
Writer-director Ryan Piers Williams has made a modest but wrenching film about the toll the Iraq war has taken on a veteran and his buddies. It raises anew awareness that the hell of combat can be only the beginning for those who survive. Even if the wounds are not grimly physical, they can be devastatingly psychological. In watching a film like this, I cannot help but think of the Iraq war as an unjustified enterprise for which those who launched it should have to pay. Now, it seems clear that the war in Afghanistan is a lost cause, and one frets at all the deaths, injuries and traumas that will keep occurring, perhaps spawning more such films in the future.
In “The Dry Land,” we meet James (Ryan O’Nan), who has come back to his town in West Texas to be reunited with his wife Sara (America Ferrera). His mother, Martha (Melissa Leo) is ill but delighted that James has come home. He is not the same James who went away.
He is a bundle of nerves, has nightmares and almost strangles his wife during one of them. Soon she moves out in exasperation and with a need for self-protection. James bottles up his feelings as his erratic behavior increases. When he gets drunk with his male friends, he can be especially dangerous. There is symbolism in the job he attempts to fill—working in his father-in-law’s slaughter house, and by the expression on his face, the scene in which he watches animals being killed and butchered in all likelihood reminds him of other butchery that he has witnessed.
O’Nan gives a steadily powerful performance as James, who can’t remember what happened when he and his fellow soldiers met disaster in Iraq. On James’s sudden impulse, he and Raymond (Wilmer Valderrama), an army pal whom he looks up, take off and head for the Walter Reed Army Hospital Medical Center to see Henry (Diego Klattenhoff), a survivor of the lethal incident, but left a double amputee. Perhaps he will hold the answer to unravel the past.
As well as an engrossing drama, “The Dry Land” is a plea for greater recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder plaguing many combat veterans and the responsibility for those who observe such symptoms to convince veterans in need to get available help. It is also a call to conscience. A Maya Entertainment in association with Take Fountain Productions and Besito Films release.
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