The most vociferous complaints tend to revolve around the film’s depiction of Leavey’s dog, Rex. She told others’ stories, and staked the claim to them.” Kate Mara stars as Megan Leavey in Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s MEGAN LEAVEY, a Bleecker Street release. The problem is that Leavey did not tell her story. “I would not want to feel attacked and hated by my fellow Marines because I was telling my story. “As a fellow female Marine, I tried to put myself in her shoes,” one letter reads. The Hollywood Reporter called it “affectingly unvarnished,” while Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote, “Based on a true story (no, really!), this war drama deftly sidesteps the paths that suck you down in sentimental quicksand.” “ lets this irresistible real-life story tell itself with a minimum of manufactured sentiment,” gushed The New York Times. It currently boasts a respectable 85% on Rotten Tomatoes, and gave it 3.5 out 4 stars. Megan Leavey was met with a warm reception when it premiered on June 9. The military, on the other hand, favors the opposite approach, going to great lengths to ensure that whatever happens in war is thoroughly documented - in awards citations, and after-action reports, and official unit histories - so that service members can be sure that the sacrifices they make, or are willing to make, in combat won’t be misplaced or forgotten. Hollywood isn’t in the business of telling true stories - they’re trying to tell great stories, the kind that make you cry into your popcorn, the kind that win Golden Globes and Oscars, the kind that open. Few films have managed to better capture what it feels like to have just come home from war, before the brain has had time to adjust, and the whole world still feels combustible.īut is Megan Leavey a true story? Not exactly. I imagine many combat vets will watch that scene and think: I’ve been there. It takes a moment for Leavey to realize where she is, and that nothing is about to explode. Her father, confused, tells her the noise is just a car alarm. Half-awake, she stumbles into the yard, where she sees her father walking towards his car. The film’s title character, played by Kate Mara, wakes up in the middle of the night to a loud, wailing sound coming from outside her bedroom window.

The most moving scene in Megan Leavey, Hollywood’s latest big-budget war drama, doesn’t take place in the desert, or on the bomb-cratered streets of Ramadi, but rather in a quiet neighborhood in upstate New York.

Act of valor is it a true story