You know how I always qualify my own Best Foreign Film and
Best Documentary nominees with that tepid “subject-to-change” line? This is why.
Less than four days after finally settling on my award winners, not only am I going to have to retroactively adjust my nominees (and winner) for Best Documentary, but several other categories as well.
Hell and Back Again, which the Academy's documentary branch recently spurred me to investigate when they nominated it for Best Documentary, is straight up one of the best films of the year.
The subject is Sgt Nathan Harris, a gung-ho Marine whose leg was crippled by a bullet nearing the end of his deployment in a Taliban stronghold in the summer of '09. Now back on American soil and limping to readjust to civilian life, we see the exposed imbalance of a fragile mind who finds himself for the first time in a fragile body. Director Danfung Dennis employs a smart chronological structure that toggles back and forth between the “Hell” of Afghanistan and the “Back Again” of America, although by the end of the film it's suspected that home may have become Nathan's true hell.
