the notable privates under Compton's command is played by Dane DeHaan, the recalcitrant teen from the last season of In Treatment, who here plays a young man looking for connection far from home. His scenes with the young girl he's sweet on suffer from the same stilted writing, but DeHaan inhabits them with a nervous vulnerability that gives a human dimension to the loneliness on all sides of an active conflict. Sayles made the too-rare choice to maintain the language barriers between the parties, and presses them for dramatic realism. It works well overall, but the scenes with the pair of Chinese "coolies" the Americans employ feel less like a significantly private conversation than tone-deaf burlesque. A second communication gap proves slightly less intractable: DJ Qualls brings morethan his amazing Norman Rockwell physiognomy to the role of a lowly private who finds his glory as the decipherer of the brand new telegraph equipment.

Torre has the face of a diplomat, and his big, brimming eyes and conciliatory smile fill the screen with dignified authority. They can't quite fill out the character at the center of this story, however, a man whose sufferings include waterboarding, imprisonment and coercion. Even Rafael's torments are reinforced with a parallel analogy in a sequence where his gunpoint march to the Indio hideout is pointedly intercut with a village cockfight. It is perhaps at that moment that the film's real martyr, its story, succumbs to the much-dreaded and punishingly didactic death by a thousand points.