Film · HBO · 2009
Taking Chance
81Living historically.
The quietest veteran film on this shelf. One body, brought home. Sit with it.
Pass it on
The review
Most war pictures want the beach. This one wants the drive. Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl volunteers to escort Chance Phelps, a lance corporal killed in Iraq, from Dover to Wyoming. The work is forms, a uniform that has to stay right, and people in airports who do not know what to do with their hands. The film lets them be clumsy. It does not turn them into a chorus.
Watch it with anyone old enough to understand a funeral. Say that a salute from a stranger is not the same thing as a policy, and that the family at the end is not a symbol. They are the people who have to live in the house after the uniform leaves. That is the whole film, and it is enough.
Journal
Keep Taking Chance in the record.
No house has filed a sentence for this yet.
Live Historic number 81. Yours can differ.
The glance
Piety is the thin one.
Can conscience actually stop someone, or is reverence only in the shot so it can be mocked?
This phone is set for a grown person, just me. Change the ages.
The eight
- 8Industry
Escort duty is a job with a rule for every hour, and he does the job.
- 8Household
The corporal's family is the house at the end of the road. The officer has one of his own he is away from.
- 7Piety
He prays, and the towns along the way treat the body as something owed.
- 7Courage
The courage is not a firefight. It is staying with the dead until the family has him.
- 8Republic
Strangers on a highway stop. That is a public, for one day, remembering who it sent.
- 9Temperance
No appetite. The film refuses the battle scene.
- 9Truth
A real escort, a real name. The film does not invent a speech to improve him.
- 9Stewardship
What it hands a house is the cost, carried in a box, not a flag in a commercial.
Where to watch
Finding the page.
Live Historic · Taking Chance · 81IMDb tt1019454
