Mark Reviews Movies: AN ACCEPTABLE LOSS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 24, 2019

At some point in this review, it will become necessary to reveal a major plot point that is repeatedly hinted at—to the point almost everyone will have figured it out by the time it's revealed—but kept a secret until about halfway through the movie. It's impossible to discuss what's wrong with An Acceptable Loss, on both a dramatic and thematic level, without discussing this vital piece of information. To put it as vaguely as I care to, an old cliché deserves a bit of a revision: This movie misses the devastation of a burned-down forest for a semantic argument about why somebody thought it was a good idea to set fire to a single tree.

The decision to create suspense about what happened four years prior to the present-day events of this story is baffling. Writer/director Joe Chappelle basically writes himself into a corner from the start, turning a momentous event in the course of the movie's fictional history into a mystery.

Once we learn the truth of what occurred, the screenplay's attempts to obfuscate the very mention of this event become even more unbelievable. It happened, changing the terms of what can be considered normal military tactics and the philosophy of the United States and the lives of countless people. For some reason, though, not a single character in the movie directly addresses what happened, until Chappelle decides that the audience finally deserves to hear it.

At that point, the event itself is mostly forgotten, because Chappelle clearly has no intentions to explore the moral, ethical, and political ramifications of the act. Instead, he gives us a rather harebrained thriller about two people trying to evade forces that don't want part of the truth to be made public.

In the story's present, Libby (Tika Sumpter), a former White House staffer who was fundamental to making that decision four years ago, has been given a cushy job teaching politics at a California university. Amidst controversy and protests, Libby goes about this job, while writing a secret manuscript at night. Her efforts are about to be threatened by Martin (Ben Tavassoli), a post-graduate student whose research into the new professor turns to stalking and, ultimately, into home-invasion and planting cameras throughout Libby's house.

All the while, Chapelle's screenplay plays a very awkward game of giving us just enough information to know that Libby was at least partly responsible for something controversial—likely terrible—while she was on staff at the White House. There are the protests, of course, and there are also staff and faculty members on campus who are reluctant to shake Libby's hand or get drunk enough to interrupt a party to call her a war criminal.

Meanwhile, through flashbacks to four years ago, Libby has a series of conversations with Rachel (Jamie Lee Curtis), someone of some authority in the White House (Her job is weirdly kept a secret until the big revelation), about a strategy for the conflicts in the Middle East. There's also a chunk of exposition via flashback when Adrian (Jeff Hephner), Libby's former lover and now the Chief of Staff to the President, comes calling, looking for Libby's support in the President's re-election campaign.

At a certain point, well before it's explicitly explicated, the secret of Libby's past becomes a given. Once one does figure that out, Chapelle's constant dodging of the issue becomes irritating, because, if our suspicions are correct (It's almost a guarantee they will be, by the way, considering the loaded subject matter that Libby discusses in the classroom), then the filmmaker has abandoned any attempt to examine the aftereffects on the nation, politics, and the psyches of the people who would partake in such a choice. It's all a game for him—a puzzle that will be solved for us, just so the movie can further dodge the ramifications for a series of chase sequences.

Here, then, the secret must be revealed, because the treatment of the revelation itself turns the movie from irritating to almost inexcusable. The big secret is that Libby helped to convince the then-President to fire a nuclear missile at a Middle Eastern city. The pre-emptive attack killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The inexcusable part of this is that Chappelle doesn't treat the act itself as a wrong. It determines that what makes it wrong is the fact that Libby used false evidence to make her case.

The intrinsic argument is that the act itself is justifiable—even right, in a certain way. An Acceptable Loss sees mass-scale horror and suffering only as a cheap plot device for a thin, hollow story.

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