Mark Reviews Movies: CHERRY (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 25, 2021

The story of Cherry is stark and grim. Fraternal directors Anthony and Joe Russo's method to telling that story is stylish and self-aware. This may be simplifying matters, but the combination here simply doesn't work.

The foundation of the tale comes from Nico Walker's semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, adapted for the screen by Angela Russo-Otstot (the directors' sister) and Jessica Goldberg. It's a personal story (obviously, given its origin) but almost sprawling in its depiction and dissection of the issues and ills of a generation. Our unnamed protagonist is a good, promising young man, whose life seems ready for success, but with one decision, all of that promise and at least the external showing of that goodness disappear.

These filmmakers clearly believe they have an important story to tell, and their instinct is to make certain we know how Important it is. The narrative is divided into chapters, with a prologue and an epilogue to boot. The camera is almost always in motion, and if it's not, there are multiple cuts within fairly simple scenes of, say, a couple talking in bed (switching between close-ups of faces, of course, but also to shots of hands touching skin). Our hero talks or gives knowing looks directly to the camera, breaking the fourth wall to impart learned wisdom or to highlight the irony of a given situation.

Whether or not Walker's tale is entirely truthful is immaterial, because it's fiction, for one thing, and, for another, we can sense the honesty of the character's trials in war and, after returning home from combat, struggles with addiction. Looking past all of the stylistic flourishes and narrative tricks of this movie, that sense of honesty does feel important. In the Russos' disposition toward filling this tale with as many artificialities as possible, though, we can't get past the insistence of the movie's own sense of Importance.

The protagonist is credited as "Cherry" (Tom Holland), whose story begins with a flash-forward of him robbing a bank. Years earlier, he was just a teenager in college, doing well but feeling generally shy and a bit out-of-place at big parties and whatnot. He meets Emily (Ciara Bravo), starts dating her, and falls in love.

She's a bit distant, though, as a couple of flashbacks to her past, framed with theatrical backdrops, give us a quick understanding of an abusive father. Emily decides to transfer to a school in Montreal, and a despondent Cherry determines that the best way to move past his heartbreak is to join the Army, currently looking for volunteers to fight in Iraq.

When Emily changes her mind, it's too late. Cherry is off to training and then the Middle East as a medic now, waiting to go home to the life he wants as Emily's husband later.

Those are the basics, and there's no denying that this story digs into a sense of aimlessness and anxiety—in general, as the course of Cherry's life takes him into increasingly difficult positions without any notion of how to escape them, and in the specifics of war and especially the constant cycle of addiction. The movie's tone, emphasized by Holland's often sardonic asides, is what stands out here. Cherry is a smart guy, fully aware of his troubles ("Don't join the f------ Army," he realizes—a bit too late) and an assortment of hypocrisies surrounding him (The drill sergeants talk about how awful combat is, but even before he experiences the full extent of it, Cherry knows they know nothing).

If there's a tragedy here, it's that someone can know all of these things and still fall in line with and fall victim to them. It's difficult to tell, though, if the Russos really understand anything that Cherry and, through him, Walker are trying to say.

Their movie is big, loud, and energetic—not the kind of nervous energy that comes to define Cherry's trauma, uncertainty, and need for prescription medication or illegal drugs to numb all of that pain, either. The battle scenes in Iraq are huge, with aerial and wide shots of firefights and convoys moving across the desert toward danger. As a result, there's little sense of intimacy in Cherry's disillusionment and, when he loses the only person who made the war interesting in a horrifying moment, eventual pain.

The material involving the drug use, which gradually leads Cherry toward a life of crime to keep buying himself and Emily heroin, is also broad. There are some tough scenes in the early stages, as Cherry spirals and Emily moves toward opioids to dull her own pain in being unable to help her husband. That's set aside, though, for the movie's instincts toward the obvious: a lot of plot, involving Cherry trying to pay off his dealer "Pills & Coke" (Jack Reynor), and plenty of sarcastic humor (The banks Cherry robs have pointedly generic names, and the satirical point of that detail is just as empty and generic).

On the surface, Cherry is a sprawling story about the angst and agony of a generation. Unwilling or unable to tap into those deeper emotions and concerns, the Russo brothers, though, focus exclusively on the sprawling surface elements of their movie.

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