Gritty ‘Cherry’ a story of addiction, degradation

OPINION | REVIEW: Gritty ‘Cherry’ a story of addiction, degradation

Web of PTSD

Tom Holland plays a former Army medic with PTSD who becomes addicted to Heroin and starts robbing banks to pay for his habit in “Cherry,” brothers Anthony and Joe Russo’s film version of Nico Walker’s semi-autobiographical novel.
Tom Holland plays a former Army medic with PTSD who becomes addicted to Heroin and starts robbing banks to pay for his habit in “Cherry,” brothers Anthony and Joe Russo’s film version of Nico Walker’s semi-autobiographical novel.

Marvel Cinematic Universe fame is a double-edged kind of sword: It gives the opportunity for world-wide acclaim, taking everyone from a risky former drug addict, to a relative unknown, to an amusing comedy stalwart, and turning them all into stone-cold superstars, with money falling out of their pockets, and the significant notice of every studio in Hollywood; but it also, indelibly and forever, associates you with your MCU-related success.

If you're say, Robert Downey Jr. (the recovering addict), already a star of sorts, just in need of rehabbing his image, it can work magically. Sure, younger fans might perennially see him as Tony Stark, but there are plenty of other moviegoers who have known him for years in other roles.

If, however, you're a young actor, whose big breakthrough was, say, a certain webhead wall-crawler, things could get a bit more touchy. What Tom Holland -- all of 24 but still playing high school student Peter Parker in the MCU's "Spider-Man" franchise -- has realized, or at least his agent has advised, is the need to diversify as soon as possible so that his career can continue beyond web-swinging and fighting different versions of Doc Ock.

To that end, he has taken the time-honored path honed by many a young leading man before him (Michael J. Fox, Sean Penn, Jake Gyllenhaal, among many, many others) and made something of a war picture. Along similar lines and under a similar plight, the Russo brothers, fresh from their "Avengers" adventures, have also seen fit to stake their claim, outside wacked-out TV comedies, and intricately interwoven superhero movies.

Their resulting collaboration, "Cherry," based on the novel by Nico Walker (and adapted for the screen by Angela Russo-Otstot and Jessica Goldberg), mish-mashes its way through several sort of iterations -- at times, it feels like a YA novel; other times, a war story; and yet other times, a junkie fable -- but Holland certainly gets his point across, if nothing else: He can go beyond spandex and CGI into something a good bit more gritty, when the material calls for it.

As if you had any early questions, our first glimpse of him here is when, looking like hell, and strung out like a rag-doll, he lights a smoke, and proceeds into a bank in order to commit yet another robbery.

This prelude begins in 2007, but we are quickly whipped back to the beginning, as it were, some five years previous, where young Cherry (Holland), is attending a local Ohio college, and happens to meet the impetuous Emily (Ciara Bravo) for the first time. The two fall crazy in love almost instantly, which, for reasons the film never begins to adequately explain, leads Emily to decide she loves him too much and must therefore move away and transfer schools to somewhere in Montreal (McGill University most likely, but as with every other proper name locale in the film, it remains annoyingly unspecified).

In his grief at her sudden, and unexpected break-up, Cherry makes the equally perplexing decision to enlist in the Army. In the midst of the Iraq War. Eventually, it turns out, Emily was only half-serious about moving, and breaking up with him, but, by then, Cherry is locked in and about to ship out for basic training. The two decide the best course of action is to get married before he goes away for two years, so he lights out for basic training with his new wife eagerly awaiting his return.

Basic training leads to actual deployment, which leads Cherry to endure the many, and already well-trodden, horrors of war. A medic, he's tasked with facing the devastation and death head-on, such that when he does return, sound in body, if not mind, he's wracked with PTSD -- can't sleep, jiggering his leg, nervous, anxious and paranoid, and becoming more and more reliant on pills and booze to mellow him out. Emily eventually gets tired of fighting him on his addictions, and joins up with him instead, leading them both to become full-on heroin junkies, ever more desperate for their next fix. Soon, Cherry is massively in debt to the wrong sorts of people and resorts to bank-robbing as a means of keeping he, his wife, his best friend, James (Forrest Goodluck), and their dealer, um, Pills & Coke (Jack Reynor), from facing the horror presented by a drug lord known only as "Black" (Daniel R. Hill).

Cannily, Holland hasn't fallen so far astray from the nice-guy Parker image that he can't be redeemed. Cherry is a mess, to be certain, but not a violent one (early on, in one of the film's many, many voice-overs and direct addresses, he states his case: "It's not that I'm dumb to the beauty of things," he muses. "I take all the beautiful things to heart, until they f* me in the heart, and I about die from it" -- a passage so obviously literary in inception, I can only assume it comes straight from the novel, and, ergo, doesn't quite fit in with his voice elsewhere), and his foibles, though they be legion, stem from an understandable bout of mental illness after experiencing such horror and desecration out in the Middle-Eastern battlefields. He also loves his wife quite utterly (he forgoes porn in Iraq, out of deference to her), and never wants to hurt anyone, just to quiet the constant "loudness" in his head.

Still, the role has plenty of edginess, and opportunity for Holland to emote, and sob, and have an absolute freak out in his truck after he takes Emily to the hospital after an OD episode, which further burnishes his bonafides as an actor, and not so much a Parker (see also his dark turn in the nearly unwatchable southern-gothic fiasco, "The Devil All The Time").

As for the rest of the film, I can't say it does as much for the Russos. Visually, the film is filled with the usual sorts of off-speed pitches -- twisty camera angles, different aspect ratios, sudden color desaturation to signify an X trip, a warpy POV shot to signify an Oxy high, etc. -- that keep popping like so many colored balloons, to mix my metaphors, but it feels a lot closer to off-brand Michael Bay, than Martin Scorsese. A lot of stuff happens, but the effect feels like it's meant to distract us from the relative banality of the characters, not enhance our understanding of them.

I can't speak to the novel, which I'm told is very good, but the film has a weakness for cliche -- in one voice-over, as another former soldier with similar post-traumatic stress disorder is described by Cherry, we see him standing outside his apartment, with time-lapse storm clouds building all around him -- and until the last act, where we finally get back to the opening bank robbery, there's a perfunctory sort of vibe, which goes hand-in-hand with its bloated running time, which, it must be said feels like an indulgence.

A different film could have started there and more or less successfully implied much of the rest through well-crafted storytelling, but, instead the Russos give us two full acts of back story before we get to begin over again. Hard to assess much with this limited sample size, but for this movie, at least, seems it might be easier for a Marvel Cinematic Universe actor to shed his spandex, than a pair of directors, used to a virtually unlimited budget and universal scope, to embrace something a good deal smaller and more personal.

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‘Cherry’

86 Cast: Tom Holland, Ciara Bravo, Jack Reynor, Michael Rispoli, Jeff Wahlberg, Forrest Goodluck, Ann Russo, Michael Gandolfini, Daniel R. Hill

Directors: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

Rating: R, for sexual content, disturbing and violent Images, pervasive language and drug abuse

Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes

Playing theatrically; on Apple TV + March 12

Tom Holland plays a former Army medic with PTSD who becomes addicted to Heroin and starts robbing banks to pay for his habit in “Cherry,” brothers Anthony and Joe Russo’s film version of Nico Walker’s semi-autobiographical novel.
Tom Holland plays a former Army medic with PTSD who becomes addicted to Heroin and starts robbing banks to pay for his habit in “Cherry,” brothers Anthony and Joe Russo’s film version of Nico Walker’s semi-autobiographical novel.

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