This film is a character study without enough character. The leading male role has no definable personality at all, which is clearly not the fault of the actor playing the part. The leading female role has a striking personality, but hardly does anything in the story. The biggest supporting female role starts out strong and then withers as the movie goes along. The biggest supporting male role is dynamically portrayed, but is pretty much the same stereotype that's appeared in countless other films. Much of the rest of the cast gets a moment or two to shine, which doesn't help a lot because none of them ultimately matter in the threadbare plot that does little but strand each character on screen with little to do.
Mark Deloach (Jonathan Tucker) is a rich man's son who causes an auto accident that severely injures a priest (Ed Begley Jr.) and, somehow, causes a teenage classmate (Agnes Bruckman) to become emotionally disturbed. To avoid prison, Mark gets shipped out to the Marines. His drill instructor (Val Kilmer) takes special care to entertainingly whip Mark into a man. In his attempts to make amends to his victim, Mark meets her roommate. Dori Lawrence (Rachael Leigh Cook) is a schizophrenic celebrity who went away to the nuthatch after she started to break down on set and in public.
That's the set up. Here's the plot. Mark and Dori fall in love. Their relationship turns out to be bad for Dori's mental health. They break up. Then two years later, after exploiting a national tragedy for a plot point, they get back together and liver happily ever after. And no, I'm really not leaving anything out.
Stateside claims to be based on a true story. Well, I can imagine this story was a powerful and moving thing to live through. That doesn't mean it's an interesting thing to watch. Even though the film moves along at a good clip, I lost interest in it about a half hour before it was over because there's just not enough going on. Well, there's stuff going on. However, it doesn't come together in a coherent narrative. I got to a point where I realized an awful lot of what I'd been watching wasn't going to lead anywhere or have any significance.
The very pretty Rachael Leigh Cook does a nice job as Dori. Mental illness is too often either overly charming or overly threatening in movies. Cook effectively the appealing intensity and the disturbing erratic nature of someone dancing as fast as they can along the edge of sanity. The relationship between Dori and Mark, a stupid guy the Marines have made so fearless he's unfazed by her imbalance, is the most appealing thing about Stateside.
Unfortunately, it's one of only two things that work here. The other being the basic training scenes where Val Kilmer appears to take genuine delight in playing a fit, macho alpha male. His torments of enlistee Deloach are amusing, but nothing you haven't seen before.
There are simply too many characters here who have nothing to do but orbit around Mark and Dori. And while Dori is a star who could support many planets, Mark is a burned out cinder. He's a nonentity as a high school kid, completely unexceptional as a Marine-in-training and the only distinguishing characteristic he ever has is his reflexive affection for Dori.
Oh, and one other thing. At the end of the movie, Dori and Mark finally break up. About 5 minutes later, the story jumps forward in time two years
and Dori and Mark get back together. I don't care what kind of tale you are telling, you can't have a climactic break-up and feel good reunion take place within 5 minutes of each other at the end of your movie. It either falls flat or gives the viewer a case of emotional whiplash.
If you don't care about plot and do care about Rachael Leigh Cook, you might enjoy Stateside. But if unresolved and, frankly, forgotten conflicts and characters bother you, this isn't your sort of thing.
