World War II films are a dime a dozen. Every director seems to think that the shortcut to an Academy Award is making a movie where handsome young men in period clothes and dirty faces stare up at a sky full of enemy planes and then run through a muddy field as shells explode around them.
Annoyingly, most of these directors are correct. These movies are, without a doubt, Oscar-bait. If they are actually deserving of the award, however, remains to be seen.
Tommy Jacks has all the trappings of such a film. You have the handsome young men, you have the dirty faces, and the running through the mud. There’s the requisite love story between an earnest soldier and his blushing bride-to-be. There’s enough patriotism to make an American flag cry.
And if those were the only things it had, it would be as cliché and forgettable as most of its brothers-in-film.
But Tommy Jacks has something that those other movies don’t have. It has Oliver Matthias.
As the titular Tommy, Matthias wants out of the small town, a place where he is constantly butting up against his family’s expectations. It’s clear, immediately, that he’s too clever for his own good—that he believes he’s destined for better things.
Gabe Parker plays his younger brother, his opposite in every way. He’s not smart; in fact, he dropped out of high school to join the family dairy farm, where he apparently spends his days shirtless and glistening in the golden-lit fields behind the house. He joins the army because “I think I might be able to make a small sort of difference.”
There’s a love triangle—I know, I know, but trust me, please—with the two brothers in love with the same girl. She lets Matthias’s character romance her with poetry and promises of a life outside their podunk town, but she accepts Parker’s ring before they ship out, because, as she says, “He ain’t much to think about, but he sure is a lot to look at.”
It’s clear that this has always been the case—Matthias’s Tommy is too intense, too intelligent, too much for everyone—while his sweet, simpleminded brother might not be the right choice, but he’s the easy one.
Of course, that means he has to be sacrificed at the altar of war.
This isn’t a spoiler—Parker’s Billy is lost within the first twenty minutes of the film.
A lesser writer and director could have turned this story into one about Tommy’s redemption—about him leaving behind the ambition on the battlefield where his brother dies. It could have been about him stepping into his brother’s shoes and learning that maybe Billy was right all along—that it’s the “small sort of difference” that truly matters.
But that’s not the story of Tommy Jacks.
Chapter
4
Gabe nursed the last fourth of his beer. It was still sunny out, but had gotten colder. Enough that I’d needed to pull my sweater out of my bag. I knew that we were reaching the end of the interview—that it was likely that once this beer was finished, Gabe would call for the check and it would be over.
I had wanted this article to be something special. Not just to impress my editors and get more work—though that was part of it—I wanted to impress myself. Wanted to prove something.
I wanted this article to be something special, because I wanted to be something special. I wanted to be the kind of writer that could take a subpar interview and spin it into gold.
At this point, I’d be lucky if I didn’t just regurgitate every other story that had already been written about Gabe.
To put it mildly, I was fucked.
I couldn’t even really use Gabe’s assertion that Oliver had been the production’s first choice. It wasn’t enough to prove anything, Ryan Ulrich could just deny it, and I’d look foolish.
But while my attempt to interview Gabe had been a complete and unmitigated disaster, Gabe’s interrogation of me was going swimmingly.
“You and the Novelist are done, huh?” he asked.
That’s what I called Jeremy on the blog when I wrote about him. And since we’d just broken up—again—I’d written about him recently.
“Yep,” I said, looking down at my notes, praying I’d thrown a secret Hail Mary in there somewhere. “We’re done.”
The Novelist. What a dumb non-pseudonym. Maybe Jeremy was right about my writing skills.
After all, he was actually a novelist, with a highly anticipated first novel under contract. I maintained a navel-gazing blog and interviewed celebrities. Badly.
“Our sensibilities are too disparate,” he’d said when we broke up this time. “We’re going in opposite directions.”