Critic Reviews

In Myers’s capable hands, and with a powerful, vanity-free performance by Monaghan, Fort Bliss joins “Coming Home” and “The Best Years of Our Lives” as a movie deeply in sync, not just with the military characters it depicts, but also with the civilian world that awaits them with such confoundingly mixed messages.

Monaghan is stronger still. This is a performance that deserves to be noticed. She is crushingly good.

Despite what seem like the trappings of a Lifetime movie, writer-director Claudia Myers presents us with an unflinching and complex character study of an imperfect woman.

Maggie’s agonizing zero-sum struggle to balance a life of military service and a steady relationship with her son feels fresh, raw, and real — even if the conflict it enacts is as old as the transition between The Iliad and The Odyssey, between the horrors of the battlefield and the difficult journey home.

Fort Bliss is a solid tough-adjustment-coming-home melodrama built around a superb performance by Michelle Monaghan.

[Michelle Monaghan's] at her best as Army medic/staff sergeant Maggie Swann in writer-director Claudia Myers's Fort Bliss.

Fort Bliss is a flawed little gem of a movie, but Monaghan’s flawless performance is its own quiet call to arms.

Myers, whose background is in documentaries involving Afghanistan and Iraq War vets, is good at capturing the revealing, offhand moments in this story, but Maggie’s conflicts about motherhood and the military needed a greater psychological scope than this film provides.

Although competently made, the film is such a run-of-the-mill military melodrama that it might have skipped its assuredly brief theatrical appearance and gone straight to VOD.

Though it drags in spots and doesn’t convince on all fronts, Bliss is nonetheless a worthy minor addition to a canon of homefront films.