Stronger Review

Keeping the bombing itself off screen, in fragments that surface later, frees the film to be about the year afterward instead of the morning of. What it finds there is unflattering and better for it. Jeff Bauman is shown as a man who was unreliable before he lost his legs and remains unreliable after, cheered by a stadium while he panics in the wheelchair, drinking with a family that treats his injury as household property. Tatiana Maslany plays the girlfriend who ends up doing the physical labour of the recovery, and the hospital bathroom scene where she holds him upright and neither of them can find a word is the best work in the picture.

Miranda Richardson makes the mother a precise kind of monster, loving and self serving in the same breath. The bandage change, filmed without a cut, is hard to sit through and earns the right to be. Where David Gordon Green loses the thread is the last reel, which reaches for reconciliation on a schedule and gives Jeff a speech about what the crowd needs from him that states plainly what two hours had been doing by implication.