Tom Holland presents a lean and hungry visage at the start of Anthony and Joe Russo’s Cherry, in which we see the eponymous character robbing a bank in spectacularly half-assed fashion. The young man’s lack of planning and obvious blindness to consequences is partly due to him being a strung-out opioid addict. But as the rest of this adaptation of Nico Walker’s acclaimed 2018 semi-autobiographical novel reveals, that combination of cluelessness and recklessness was propelling him even before a tour in Iraq sent him down a path toward addiction. “I’m 23 years old,” Cherry says in the narration stringing together the film’s earlier, more hyperactive stretches, “and I still don’t understand what it is that people do.” The center, if he ever had one, is just not holding.
After the prologue, the film cuts back five years to 2002, when Cherry is already planting the seeds of his future self-destruction. As played by Holland with bright-eyed verve, even when he’s at his most ruinous and lost, Cherry bounces somewhat randomly through life. We hear a lot from him at first—literally so, as he narrates his flailing attempts to get a grip on life while killing time in Cleveland alongside his going-nowhere friends and working crummy jobs. Later, as a series of bad choices limits his options, he will have less to say.
On autopilot at a Jesuit university, Cherry falls hard for a classmate, Emily (Ciara Bravo), who’s presented to the audience much as she seems to him: a bright and beautiful paragon of confidence whose self-consciousness and snarky humor meshes well with his. Even though Emily seems to have her life somewhat more together, she ultimately remains as much an enigma in the film as life itself does to Cherry. Theirs is a giddy but unstable relationship, an impression reinforced when, after a fight with her, Cherry lashes out by joining the Army at the height of Iraq War. Even more impulsively, they get married right before he leaves.
Cherry’s middle section, which traces our protagonist’s military service, is its least convincing. For a film already clocking in at a good 20 minutes too long, the entire basic training sequence feels highly redundant, the absurdities of military life just underlining yet again how lost Cherry is in a world that seems to him like little more than a bad joke. In Iraq, the Russos frame some large action scenes with an impressive sweep but are less sure-footed at balancing the emotional trauma of Cherry’s experiences as a combat medic with his jaundiced humor.
State-side, Cherry’s life unravels fast in a blur of PTSD heightened by his lack of direction. He and Emily get hooked on heroin, which in short order leads to hijinks like stealing from a dealer, cash-flow issues, and robbing banks. The couple’s newfound life of crime and the challenges they face from both drugs and withdrawal is presented with greater immediacy and drama than earlier scenes which tended to view even significant developments from a distance. But the film still can’t escape the essential hollowness of Cherry as a character.
By linking the disasters of wars abroad with the home-front disaster of addiction and Cherry’s pre-Iraq purposelessness, the filmmakers seem to be suggesting that America is danger-prone and careless about risk. But though the film touches on numerous hot-button topics and is packed with incident and humor, its self-aware style—from straight-to-camera narration to slow motion to visual tricks like the washing out of an entire background so a character will pop out in bright color—and simplistic characterizations deprive it of the chance to say much of anything. The filmmakers’ curious decision to cap the film with a vaguely hopeful coda, but without any dialogue that could help explain what Cherry might be changing in his life, only underlines their failure to illuminate their main character beyond his lostness.
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