Thank You For Your Service. That’s a line all the brave men and women who die for their country have to hear when they come home. For the politician, there is an implied “and now get back to your normal life.” But for a solider, that phrase implies the unknown. Thank You For Your Service remembers the serving part, but fully shows us what life is like in that unknown for someone who comes back from war.
After a particularly trying stint in Iraq, Adam (Miles Teller), Billy (Joe Cole), and Solo (Beulah Koale) finally have arrived back home. Adam wants to pick up his life where it left off, married to Saskia (Haley Bennett) and raising his newborn. Billy hopes to marry his long time girlfriend; and Solo wants to redeploy because he loves the military. However, the last deployment was particularly taxing on all 3, leaving them with PTSD (Post traumatic stress disorder), which the men have to navigate alone after the government discharged them.
Movies about PTSD usually focus more on the war part, due to its built-in cinematic nature. Thank You For Your Service focuses entirely on the post-war period, a fresh movie take. As scary as war, can be, you would think these guys would be excited to come back and hit the reset button, but no; they no longer understand their past lives. It sometimes is little things, like Adam forgetting his daughter hates chocolate chips or Billy coming home to an empty house. PTSD isn’t helping either; hunting trips or something as simple as sidewalk trash can plop any of the soldiers back into combat in their brain. The combination of PTSD and little misunderstands merge and lead to freak outs and blow ups; it’s gut wrenching to watch someone as stoic as Solo lose it playing Call of Duty and almost hurt his fiance. Life on the home front isn’t easy either. Saskia has to take care of and provide for 2 kids, but she also has to help coax Adam back to normal and keep him from thinking suicidal thoughts. Even worse, when everyone involved actually reaches out for help, we see that the VA is underequipped to handle the absurd number of requests; this understaffing leads to infrequent care, which then further pushes these soldiers and their families further into despair. There are occasional bright spots, like a soldier who has trouble peeing on his own but is just thankful to be alive, but Thank You For Your Service points out we still have a long way to go to fix this issue and get our men what they need; in addition, there are even more on the way that will need a hand, geez.
The acting is pretty great uniformly across the leads. Miles Teller continues to prove he’s rapidly rising to be amongst the best thespians of his generation, doing the physical work to look like a soldier but deep enough to convey a complex set of emotions ranging from duty to anger to fear to a mixture of all of them. It’s a showy role, but Teller is part of the reason it stands out. Beulah Koale is a surprise; a vet of TV programming, Koale must either have a military background or know a family member who does. Solo’s descent is conveyed by Koale as a mixture of uncertainty, brokenness, and rage. Solo’s toxicity as the movie progresses becomes the most interesting part of the movie, greatly due to Koale’s immersion into the role. Haley Bennett and Amy Schumer do what they can. I almost could see a whole movie about Bennett’s character and what life is like from her perspective, as she has an iron will to move on and put her family on her back.
I probably should try to understand military veterans better; however, I am very fearful of hearing about the horrors they must have endured. Thank You For Your Service helps remind me that these people aren’t cyborg assassins ready to murder at a moment’s notice, but complicated real people who have seen humanity at its worst and are coping with the consequences. If anything, this puts me more in awe of them, because they usually willingly put their entire life on the line for the belief in a country they love. No BS gents. Thank you for your service. Now let’s help you out for a change.