Military Wives, the new feature from director Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty), takes the true story of wives choirs and turns it to a comedy/drama through the pens of Rosanne Flynn (The Labyrinth) and Rachel Tunnard (Adult Life Skills). While somewhat entertaining, it would have been much better as one genre or the other because the script fails as both.
Left feeling lonely after the death of her son and redeployment of her colonel husband in Afghanistan, Kate (Kristin Scott Thomas) inserts herself into the enlisted wives' morale group. But she tries to take it over rather than integrate. She immediately clashes with Lisa (Sharon Horgan), the group's official leader, over what they should do to keep themselves occupied. They ultimately decide on a choir, although they still disagree over how formal it should be. But when the brigade commander hears them singing and suggests they perform at the Festival of Remembrance, they have no choice but to get it together, for the honor of their base and their loved ones.
The film starts slowly, and it is no service to the story that the tension between the two lead characters is so tight that it bleeds into the audience. This tension creates a feeling of uncomfortable eavesdropping rather than sympathy for either character. This remains right up to the final minutes and dilutes the vital message of what it is like to be the spouse of someone deployed in a war zone. Cattaneo does manage to adequately convey the various ways that military wives cope. Still, the impact isn't as significant as it would be without the additional tension.
Thomas and Horgan do an exceptional job of conveying the tension between their characters. Whether this is a testament to their acting, Cattaneo's directing, or actual tension between the actresses is hard to discern because it is utterly realistic. This leaves the viewer as uncomfortable as the other characters on the screen that witness their encounters. Beyond this, virtually every actor is a good fit for his or her role, whether it is a war dog husband going off to battle or a young, unsure spouse discovering she is a widow.
There isn't much to say about the settings for a film set within a generation of its release date. What stands out more is the characters themselves, trying to cope with the expected, the unexpected, and the feared. Looking beyond the leads to the other characters and events that are a background to the tale is where the hidden gold of this film is - and indeed where it should be.
Military Wives does a good enough job of letting the audience know what it is like to be on the home side of a war. But its attempt to straddle two genres on such a serious subject doesn't strike the right notes and ends up being off-key.