Director Liza Johnson depicts a different side of military life

The soldier’s homecoming, with its contrast between civilian life and the hideousness of war, is a mainstay film genre.

Writer and director Liza Johnson’s “Return,” premiering Friday, is a homecoming tale with a defining feature removed—there is no trauma, no horror of war. Protagonist Kelli’s main struggle is not to heal, but to readjust to a home life that doesn’t fit her anymore.

During the film, Kelli only loaded crates during her deployment to the Middle East and never sees combat. Rather, the main conflict of the film is Kelli’s struggle to fit back into a family and a community that she has become used to being away from—and that has been used to her absence.

“[I wondered] what does this feel like in every day life to stay married when you’ve been in one kind of experience and the person that you’re with has been in a more everyday American experience,” Johnson said. “That was a story that I in my civilian life don’t hear that often.”

For Johnson, their mistake is in assuming that Kelli is hurting.

“What if she’s not damaged at all, but she just cannot tolerate the damage to the world she lives in the same way that she used to be able to?” Johnson said.

This question drives the movie. One poignant scene shows Kelli dissatisfied with her manufacturing job at home, which she perceives as small in comparison to her experiences at war. She contrasts that with unloading a jet filled entirely with rubber gloves while on deployment.

Johnson’s inspiration was personal—the film takes place in a defunct industrial town much like the one she grew up in. “It’s very compelling to me to see people there kind of gesturing towards their future even though there’s a really big absence of meaningful work,” Johnson said.

Johnson herself did not have direct military experience, but said that she was inspired by friends and current events.

“I would say that the initial conversation I had that made me think that it would be a good idea was a conversation I had with a friend of mine who was a man who was in the Marines, and he told me about his efforts to stay married when he got back from his military deployment,” Johnson said.

From there, Johnson was able to develop the overall concept of the film. Her exploration of crises of meaning, in the context of homecoming and beyond, has been well appreciated—“Return” was the only American film to show at last year’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.

“I feel like our military and civilian cultures in the U.S. are very separate,” Johnson said. Today’s America is more sensitive than it used to be, but this cultural division is persistent. The ignorance of the civilians in “Return” perverts their compassion, and their questions become divisive rather than conciliatory.