A tender weepie, a nervy war film, a potent self-actualization story: “Megan Leavey” is all three of these genres, but it never buckles under such ambition. This fact-based crowd-pleaser hits familiar notes and certainly plays by all the rules, but it moves with a fluid confidence that belies its director’s lack of experience in feature filmmaking. And it certainly dispels the romantic fallacy that everyone who joins the military does so out of patriotic fervor: Soon-to-be Private First Class Megan Leavey just wanted to get the heck out of Dodge.
We meet Megan (Kate Mara) in 2001, at a crossroads. Perpetually mourning the sudden death of her best friend Jesse, she feels guilty over his passing—for reasons that only reveal themselves later in the picture. Antisocial and substance-inclined, she can’t hold down a job, and her homefront, as represented by her careless and insensitive mother and stepfather (Edie Falco and Will Patton, doing yeoman’s duties in unlikeable roles), is its own everyday battlefield.
So she joins the Marine Corps, and after she’s spotted a little drunk in the wrong place at the wrong time, her punishment yields salvation: She’s demoted to cleaning the waste of the Corps’ bomb-sniffing dogs, and the rest is well-publicized history, especially in Leavey’s native New York.
Initially, her interspecies skills are as weak as her interpersonal ones, but she forms an unlikely bond with the Marines’ most aggressive service dog, Rex. She tames him, and he saves her (in more ways than one), but surviving in combat zones is half the battle. “Megan Leavey” divides its narrative between her near-fatalistic tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with her subsequent efforts, as a civilian, to gain adoption rights for the beloved German shepherd.
Megan and Rex completed more than 100 missions together. The few that make it into the film are exciting and harrowing in equal measure, generating almost unbearable tension. This effect would likely have been achieved without Rex’s presence—agony and adrenaline are in the DNA of well-made war film. But the communion between man (loosely defined) and beast is the beating heart of the film.
First-time narrative film director Gabriela Cowperthwaite, whose necessary documentary “Blackfish” helped change the captivity policies of SeaWorld, handles these interactions with comfort and compassion. With a quartet of perceptive screenwriters, she realizes insights just as applicable to nonmilitary animal care—“Everything you feel goes down-leash,” Megan is told, during her initial struggles to train, and listen to, Rex—while refusing to demonize Megan’s adoption-skeptic commanding officer (played by Common), who argues that Marine dogs are not pets but warriors, and that “they come back with all the same issues we do.”
Mara’s engagement with the canine actor(s?) playing Rex is both palpable and contagious. There’s no emotional response more authentic than her first breakthroughs with the untamed war dog, captured with a wide-eyed glimmer of hope that this difficult, four-legged Marine has just obeyed a command. It’s more than validation, finally, that she has value; it’s also the start of a beautiful friendship.
You don’t have to be dog owner to be moved by “Megan Leavey.” But it certainly doesn’t hurt.
Directed by South African journeyman Roger Michell (“Persuasion,” “Notting Hill”), and adapted from a 1951 novel by Daphne du Maurier, “My Cousin Rachel” is awash in the same European gothic dread the writer popularized in her most famous work, “Rebecca.”
Set largely in a lavish Cornwall estate, it centers on Philip (Sam Claflin), an orphan adopted by an aristocratic cousin, Ambrose Ashley. By the age of 24, Philip and Ambrose have split up, the latter wintering in Florence, where he meets an enchanting cousin named Rachel (Rachel Weisz). They hit it off, with Ambrose detailing the affair to Philip in gushing letters—until Ambrose suddenly dies, of a purported brain tumor.
Soon enough, the widowed Rachel gallops into Cornwall to see her late partner’s estate for the first time—and to meet its impressionable young heir, Philip, who harbors suspicions about Rachel’s role in his cousin’s demise.
To reveal anything more would be deleterious to the viewing experience; “My Cousin Rachel” is nothing if not a minefield of spoilers. The film feels like the visual equivalent of fine calligraphy—handsome, sumptuous, varnished. We get views of the Cornish countryside that justify a big-screen experience, plus close-ups of Weisz’s distinctive visage that showcase the actress’ impeccable intelligence, a mix of charm, wiles and calculated brusqueness.
But as a mystery, it betrays a lack of confidence in its audience to follow the plot’s machinations on their own accord: Dollops of leading soundtrack cues and overly suggestive direction from Michell telegraph his every movement, undercutting any hint of surprise (the director also labors over some particularly heavy-handed symbolism in the form of a fallen pearl necklace). Observant audiences will always be one step ahead of the characters, which isn’t the place you want to be in an atmospheric suspenser.
“Megan Leavey” and “My Cousin Rachel” open Friday in most area theaters.
