Oh, Schumann puts on a cheerful face and seems to be normal, but there's little signs in his exterior that he's just not the same man that he once was and it's even worse inside his head where suicidal thoughts and regret over his actions in the heat of combat race through his mind at all hours of the day. Schumann's best friend and fellow soldier Tausolo Aieti (Beulah Koale) is also suffering his own brand of mental-related issues stemming from his experiences on the front lines of war, namely his memory is barely functioning and he's plagued by erratic mood swings, all of this occuring just as he's on the cusp of fatherhood.
Those, like myself, going into Thank You For Your Service expecting the story to shy away from depicting the psychological brutality many soldiers experience when coming from war will be pleasantly surprised to see that Jason Hall's script actually does a fine job of exploring that all too real but tragically under-recognized aspect of military life. The screenplay examines Schumann and Aieti's individual struggles in a way that doesn't feel exploitative, showing their trauma manifests in even tiny ways, like Aieti being unable to remember the day of the week, demonstrates in a subtly tragic way just how deeply the experience of being a soldier has impacted these two men.
Hall's writing has a larger scope to it that attempts to examine the very different paths both Schumann and Aieti go down in their attempts to cope with their newfound psychological issues, but that scope is both a blessing and a curse for the story overall. While we do get plenty of perspective on how the trauma affects these two men in every aspect of everyday life, the crucial aspect of these deficiencies impacting the two men's families doesn't register as hard as it should because various important people in their lives get the short end of the stick in terms of their characterizations. Schumann's young daughter, for instance, has so little presence in the story that I kept forgetting he had a daughter while Aieti's pregnant significant other has a similarly minuscule amount of depth despite being a supposedly pivotal person in Aieti's life.
The friendship between Schumann, Aieti and fellow soldier Billy Waller (Joe Cole) also gets off to a rocky start writing-wise since the "bro"-tastic dialogue the trio shares feels like an artificial recreation of that specific vernacular, though the chemistry between the three actors does make it easy to warm up to them and buy the three characters as long-term buddies. Similar other success is found in how Jason Hall, who also makes his directorial debut here in addition to writing the film, executes the relationship between Schumann and his wife in a satisfying manner that actually makes them feel like a real couple. An extended single shot at a therapy session is a great demonstration of this as it shows the two exchange some back-and-forth dialogue that has the duo going from crestfallen to angry to laughing in a short span of time, a terrific showcase for how well Miles Teller and Haley Bennett do at exuding authentic chemistry.
Oh, how good it feels to write positive things about a Miles Teller performance again given how many lackluster projects the actor has appeared in in the past few years. Here's that kid who impressed me so much in The Spectacular Now and Whiplash earlier in the decade, now more muscular and able to recreate the Southern good o'l boy persona without it coming off as a caricature. Haley Bennett is similarly strong as a wife trying to break through to her emotionally troubled husband while perhaps the surprise of the whole cast has gotta be Amy Schumer in a tiny supporting role that has her playing a grieving widow and never once reminding me of her comedic work, she instead works quite well as a convincing dramatic actor. I wanna see her do more dramatic work after this, there could be real potential here for Schumer as an actor.
The all-around strong cast is one of the best elements of Thank You For Your Service, which is far from the best movie to take on war-related PTSD trauma but blows middling works like American Sniper out of the water in terms of examining the mental struggles soldiers returning home have to endure in a manner that actually feels insightful. As implied earlier, I went into Thank You For Your Service skeptical it could be all that engaging but I was happy to be proven wrong since the movie itself is actually a well put-together examination of how a whole other war inside your mind begins when the war on the battlefield ends.
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