‘Mending the Line’ Review: In a Moving Drama, Brian Cox and Sinqua Walls Are War Veterans Who Help Each Other Heal

Combat veterans, famously, dont tend to talk much, if at all, about their experiences of war. At least not to civilians, and maybe not even to their closest relatives. Knowing this, those of us who arent veterans tend to have ideas about the things they arent discussing. Things like violence and fear and the chaos and insanity of battle. Thats surely a part of it, but in a way its also the heightened cinematic version, the one weve all gotten from war movies. What it leaves out are the torn-up emotions of soldiers, the lifelong imprint left upon them not just by the cataclysm of war but by their relationship with their fellow soldiers the loyalty and love, the complex code of liberation and guilt at having survived.

Mending the Line is a drama about two veterans and their relationship to the combat experience, and the movie, which is also about fly fishing (in that metaphysical Zen-of-the-outdoors way), has a deceptively placid surface and a turbulent undertow that catches up to you. The central characters are both Marines, scarred and defined by the combat theyve been in. When we first see John Colter (Sinqua Walls), hes leading his platoon on their final day of deployment in Afghanistan but, of course, that routine day of recon doesnt go well. Its an ambush from hell.

Cut to three months later. John has survived and is back in the U.S., where he has been sent to several rehab centers, starting with Walter Reed and, now, the V.A. Medical Center in Livingston, Montana. His physical injuries are healing the scar tissue on his thighs from an I.E.D., the concussion he suffered. And the psychological injury? John, at a glance, looks taut and together, but he swigs from a half-pint of whiskey all day long, and we see his nightmares; theyre about the buddies he couldnt save. As for his fury at the military bureaucracy, its intense enough to feel misplaced. Hes angry at the group therapy hes assigned to do, angry at the trauma counselor who has never seen action, angry at the establishment thats subjecting him to endless rounds of evaluation. All he wants is to go back into combat.

Ike Fletcher (Brian Cox) is a retired veteran of Vietnam, a loner who doesnt drink, cook, watch TV or movies, or meet up with his fellow veterans. Thats how much of a cut-off soul he is. All he does is fly fish. For him, the sport is organized around the solitary rite of catching a wriggling trout and tossing the fish back into the water. (Its his way of deciding, each day, not to kill.)

Ike, with his white hair and beard, his occasional blackouts at the river (hes not supposed to be fishing alone), seems to be edging into a serene if precarious old age. But hes angry, too. You cant have a Brian Cox character without a residue of anger. Its there in his squinty Jaccuse! stare, in the cynicism just beneath the jolliness. At the V.A. center, Dr. Burke (Patricia Heaton) puts John and Ike together, figuring that fly fishing could do the younger man good by giving him the therapy he needs. For a while, its a boot-camp-as-Karate Kid situation, with Ike forcing John to do a lot of scutwork (not to mention homework, like researching the flies at the end of the lines and plucking a book or two out of the vast panoply of fly-fishing literature John chooses The Sun Also Rises.)

But then the two men start to fish. John, after a short while, brings along Lucy (Perry Mattfeld), a local librarian and rehab-facility volunteer, who lost her own fianc in combat. She learns to fish too. In recent years, fly fishing has become a popular form of therapy among veterans, and for a while Mending the Line encourages you to think that youre watching the PTSD version of A River Runs Through It. The river idyll doesnt last, though. John thinks hes getting better; hes primed to heed the call to rejoin the war. But the call never comes. Sinqua Walls, with his quiet, stoic, avid-eyed affability, makes John a paragon of service, to the point that we cant help but admire his courage. Yet the movie is throwing us a curveball. Its point is that John cant be an effective soldier if hes too wounded inside.

Ike, who never fully recovered from his own wounds of anguish (we sense this because hes got a son whos estranged), understands all that. Hes got Johns number. And in the last part of the movie, he gives John the message he needs to hear, in words delivered by Cox as if they were life poetry from the soul. Laying in a hospital bed, Ike tells him, In the book of every soldiers life, the military is a chapter. It never leaves you. But [whispering] its not, not the whole story. Mending the Line, directed by Joshua Caldwell from a script by Stephen Camelio, has a rote TV-movie look and a few bland and rambling passages. But it delivers a truth about those who have served, about the reality of the demons that can linger in them, thats tough and moving. The film concludes with black-and-white photographs of real veterans fly fishing, a ritual that by the end we see more clearly as a baptism of restoration for those who gave everything.