Bastards’ Road
Michael Bay’s fetishization of the military and “Americana” in his films is so engrained in my mind that, whenever director Brian Morrison uses slow motion or tracking shots as he chronicles Jon Hancock’s 5800 mile walk across America in “Bastards’ Road,” I couldn’t help but think he was borrowing from Bay. There’s so much more to this film, though, and my hope is that people watch this film with an open mind, and feel the message of Hancock’s journey, and Morrison’s film, because it’s a powerful one.
As I’ve worked through my own issues with stress, anxiety and depression, mental health has been something that matters to me, and releasing the stigma of male mental health issues is first and foremost. For generations, it’s been coded into men that if you cry, if you are depressed, if you are finding yourself hanging on by a thread, and you ask for help, you are less of a man. That’s the lie at the heart of toxic masculinity, and until we code it into boys (and men) that asking for help when you need it for mental and emotional issues does not make you “less than,” it will commence. I cannot imagine what it is like for men like Hancock, and other members of his unit (called the “Magnificent Bastards”) who went off to war, saw so many of their brothers die, and came back without a blueprint for how they were supposed move on after what they experienced. His walk is to visit his brothers, and the family some of them left behind, and work through how they cope.
I hope is that everyone who says “support our troops,” but doesn’t want to spend more on health care- especially mental health care- sees this movie, and realizes that, in order to do one, we need to do the other. My concern is that Morrison’s filmmaking style gets in the way of the message, but the heart of his film- which is Hancock’s journey- is what comes through the strongest. We sympathize and say the VA needs to be overhauled and are startled by veteran suicide numbers and homeless vets, and that’s all true, but do we every think about what we, as a society, might be able to do to correct those things? “Bastards’ Road” might be the single most important documentary about modern war, and modern soldiers, we’ve seen because it puts human faces on these issues, and even if Morrison’s filmmaking feels overwrought, the emotions come through.
This is as clear a statement as we’ve seen on PTSD that film has provided, at least from a documentary standpoint. One of the problems a lot of people have when it comes to mental health is that they feel like they have no one whom empathizes with them. After “Bastards’ Road,” it’s hard not to empathize with either Hancock, or the rest of the 2/4 Marine unit where they became family. It’s a story as important as any, to see all the sacrifices these men make for our country, and not just the ones touted by the media on the field of battle.
