I’m not sure how much attention to ascribe to this, but given that Zoe is Greek for “life,” the title of “My Dead Friend Zoe” feels a bit wry. Directed by Kyle Hausmann-Stokes from a screenplay he wrote with A.J. Bermudez, it’s a competently performed drama about an Army veteran named Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green) who fought in the Afghanistan War and must come to terms with both the loss of her friend Zoe (Natalie Morales) and the burden of taking care of her grandfather (Ed Harris), whose Alzheimer’s disease is rapidly advancing.
Some of that would probably qualify as a spoiler if it wasn’t for the title of the film, which sounds a little sardonic, a little jokey, when in fact there’s nothing sardonic or jokey about this film at all. It is achingly sincere, a tribute to two soldiers with whom Hausmann-Stokes, an Army veteran, served in Iraq.
If anything’s sardonic about the film, it’s Zoe, who has never met a joke she didn’t want to crack. Merit and Zoe spend a lot of their deployment time together, and at the start of the movie, they’re debating what they’ll do after this tour of duty ends. Merit is planning to go to college; Zoe, who seems a bit lost in life, resents Merit’s plans — college, she says, is for “rich kids and snowflakes” — and is thinking about re-enlisting.
Most of that we encounter in flashbacks. In the present, Merit is living a small life, working in a warehouse and spending a lot of her free time running, a way to shake off memories of Zoe. But Zoe shows up anyhow, at least in Merit’s mind — especially during group therapy, led by Dr. Cole (Morgan Freeman). But when her mother calls and asks her to look after her grandfather, who is himself a Vietnam veteran, Merit is forced into a closer confrontation with her memories, the version of Zoe in her mind and the feelings that’s she’s been trying to escape.
Most of the filmmaking in “My Dead Friend Zoe” feels workmanlike, proficient and straightforward in its storytelling — a promising feature debut for Hausmann-Stokes. The film’s best feature is its performances from a uniformly excellent cast, including Harris being gruffly pensive, Morales at her energetic best and Utkarsh Ambudkar as Alex, the funny local guy with whom Merit strikes up a friendship, or maybe something more. Martin-Green is tasked with carrying the story, and she does it, evoking real emotion as she processes the feelings she’s stuffed down.
The movie is ultimately about the burdens that veterans carry with them when they return home and what happens next, both in the ways that the United States often fails them and the ways in which nobody can really recover from being in a war. This is familiar territory for American films, stretching back to movies like the 1946 drama “The Best Years of Our Lives.” It’s always been an uneasy balance: Hollywood, in particular, has also turned out a much greater quantity of films that valorize military heroism without attention to the trauma and indignities of life after war. After World War II, American movies have been seen by the Pentagon as a way to engage the interest of young would-be soldiers and enlist them, a practice that continues to the present day.
“My Dead Friend Zoe,” made by a veteran about what he witnessed in the life, and death, of his fellow soldiers, runs against this tendency. Yet there’s something tonally awry in the film, and I think it goes back to that title, with its jaunty drollery, and marketing materials that describe it as “a dark comedy drama.” Audiences expecting that type of movie will likely be disappointed; it’s ultimately a sad film, if also a moving one. But “My Dead Friend Zoe” deserves a fair shake, because the story it tells is less comedic than simply imitative, in the end, of so many people’s lives.
My Dead Friend Zoe
Rated R for language, scenes of peril and trauma and the depiction of a suicide. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters.
