Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2008

FILM

LIONS FOR LAMBS
(Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, 2007)

REDACTED
(Magnolia Pictures, 2007)

NO END IN SIGHT
(Magnolia Pictures, 2006)

Films about war are not known for their subtlety; war itself is not a subtle act, even one as ambiguous and confounding as the "War on Terror" in Iraq and Afghanistan has been. And when filmmakers tackle the subject, the result is generally anything but subjective. Recently, a rush of films trying to make sense of recent history have come quickly through theaters: Rendition, The Kingdom, and In the Valley of Elah got mixed reviews, and barely registered in box office sales. And currently, Lions for Lambs and Redacted, the first showy with budgeted star power, the second deliberately shoestring, shot in HD video and with no actors of note, have arrived to a less-than-overwhelming welcome. Is it simply too soon to make meaning of this history? Are we as apathetic or complicit as indicted by some of the films? Or are we just weary of a war that Thomas Ricks, a Washington Post correspondent and author of Fiasco, called a tragedy in five acts, of which he believes we're only in act three. The documentary No End in Sight echoes this sentiment, and its recent release on DVD will hopefully broaden its audience. Whether the films are patriotic or in protest, the public seems to be covering its eyes and ears, maybe avoiding what Ricks describes as seeing that "this country collectively panicked and went down the wrong path," and not knowing the first thing about how to mitigate the damage.

Lions for Lambs, hyped to the hilt before its release, is a play-like gabfest with a confused style—mostly it feels old-fashioned, just dialogues in static settings, broken up by adrenaline-fueled action sequences in Afghanistan. The film shifts from a conversation between a conservative crocodilian senator, Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise) and a liberal, weary reporter, Janine Roth (Meryl Streep) in Washington D.C.; an apathetic but supposedly brilliant college kid, Todd Hayes (Andrew Garfield) and his liberal, weary yet motivational Vietnam vet professor, Stephen Malley (Robert Redford) at an unnamed, Berkeley-like California University; and the combat mission of two of Professor Malley's prized former students, Ernest Rodriguez (Michael Pena) and Arian Finch (Derek Luke). Senator Jasper has called in Roth to feed her an "exclusive" about an ambitious new strategy in Afghanistan, set to begin "ten minutes ago." The offensive is the child of right-wing righteousness and PR savvy—Jasper and his colleagues want to hand the country "a win" to help sell the package of the war on terror as a whole. His language is clipped and ideological, speaking of our "moral obligation" against an enemy with "medieval beliefs," culminating in the chilling phrase "whatever it takes." There isn't room for discussion, the United States is tired of being humiliated, and the question—yes or no—is do you want to win the war on terror? Cruise in this role is unfortunately, given the intended message of the film, its most convincing, if most frightening, character. Streep gets in a few good jabs, but is criminally underused; she's merely a cipher for a mainstream media that helped sell the war to the public in the first place, corporate and more concerned with web hits than truth. Her knowledge of this reads painfully on her face, along with the nostalgia for what she once was.

Cut to director Red-ford, in Professor Malley's book-lined office, across from a slumped post-teen he's trying to get through to. This sequence is the least affecting of the three, mostly because of the wunderkind himself—in the scenes meant to illuminate that he's the hope for his generation, he's more of a snotty devil's advocate. And Redford delivers the film's most cringe-worthy dialogue, telling young Todd "Rome is burning, son." The classroom scenes of his former students, however, are amongst the most moving, and raise the best questions of the film. What is each citizen's responsibility? What is the nature of privilege in this country, and can education mitigate its effects? Rodriguez and Finch are not white, came from nothing, do a class project on a new model for mandatory national service, and eventually, despite Malley's protests, sign up for duty in the hope of increasing their influence once they return. The jarring cuts to the mission, in a snowy Afghanistan, are dramatic but fairly unnecessary—they add excitement and stir an emotional response, but in the end the film seems more satisfied, and actually works better, just hearing itself talk. It is interesting to see the real-time cuts between Senator Jasper's office and the field, how modern warfare happens in real time, the trickle-down from sleek suit to pixilated camouflage. The themes that emerge in Lions for Lambs—talk vs. action, the stubbornness of leadership, propaganda, apathy of youth and complacency of age—are all valid, but is it enough just to ask these questions, repeatedly, possibly to the choir, and without much nuance?

If Lions for Lambs is a heavy hand, Redacted is a clenched, raging fist. Brian DePalma's film "visually documents imagined events" based on real events—it's a difficult movie to watch, and equally difficult to process afterward. From the outset, we're told that the film is woven around the rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers in 2006, the knowledge of which creates instant tension and dread, even through the tedium and banter of the first half. Contributing to the unease is DePalma's fragmented style, splicing together video diary of Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), footage from a fictional French Documentary called Barrage, news reports and internet videos, both from terrorists planting IEDs and antiwar vitriol on YouTube. The effect brilliantly mimics how we get our information today—fragmented, questionably reliable, and available in mass quantities if you're willing to search for it. The story follows a unit stationed at a checkpoint; their task is to stop and search all vehicles, which gives a sense of the daily humiliations Iraqis, whether innocent or insurgent, face under the occupation. The action, once it begins, is relentless—a pregnant woman is shot by Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll), and shortly after, Sergeant Sweet (Ty Jones) is killed. The men in Sweet's unit—Salazar, the upstanding Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney), the bookworm Gabe Blix (Kel O'Neill), and the two 'bad apples,' Flake and B.B. Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman)—are yanked from their uncomfortable but uneventful stupor. Like the conflict itself, we're watching a series of unbelievably bad calls premeditating the crime, born out of profound damage, distress, and frustration, which complicates but doesn't absolve the protagonists or the witnesses of responsibility. While Lions for Lambs tells the audience what the questions are, watching the visceral Redacted can't help raising the questions through the action, namely, what is the role of media and art to atrocity? What is the role of the viewer, the filmmaker, those not directly involved, but not standing up? DePalma includes a photo montage at the end of "Collateral Damage," dead Iraqi civilians may go too far for many: as Lawyer McCoy says, these "snapshots are burned in my brain forever." It seems, though, that the picture that emerges is generally sympathetic to the suffering of the soldiers, but does not excuse their crimes (though it might have been more powerful to see a shred of humanity in the eyes of the two criminals at the heart of the story). But for their evil acts, they come off as more ignorant and entitled, dehumanized by their act of dehumanizing, than truly evil.

Finally, Charles Ferguson's documentary No End in Sight, recently released on DVD, is an impassioned but even-handed look at how we got to where we are in Iraq. Focusing on the U.S. occupation after Bush's declared victory in 2003, the film chronicles the many policy blunders that have plunged Iraq into chaos, lawlessness, and ever-increasing sectarian violence. There is nothing superfluous to this film: the interviews are with major players in the military, intelligence, and academic communities, as well as with Iraqis and former U.S. soldiers. The footage shows the aftermath of a poorly planned occupation; it's noted that the occupation of Germany during WWII was planned two years in advance, the occupation of Iraq, sixty days. The film isn't explicitly antiwar or partisan—it's a mistake-by-mistake guide to all of the terrible decisions: the hermetic decision-making process that disregarded all intelligence and military advice, the exclusion of Iraqis in the interim government, and the disbanding of the Iraqi army. The last is blamed for creating the insurgency, namely the jaw-dropping stupidity of firing and angering 500,000 armed men with access to unguarded weapons caches. Again, the powers that be were supposedly warned of this outcome, but refused to listen. As the events roll on, interspersed glimpses at Bush and Rumsfield come off as callous and cavalier—Rumsfield's "stuff happens," Bush unbothered to even read the prepared summaries. This contrasts with the thoughtful, well-spoken accounts by former deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Ambassador Barbara Bodine, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, the former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, and General Jay Garner, among others, visibly frustrated that they couldn't have done more. The full tragedy of Iraq is on display, and it is as compelling as it is distressing.

There is something brave about realizing a project that is unpopular at every turn: it makes studios nervous, right-wingers furious, and moviegoers averse. Bill O'Reilly, before actually seeing Redacted, denounced it as anti-American, and demanded that it be pulled from theaters. This typically flippant use of Anti-American,' particularly in relation to art, is appalling, used when any critical viewpoint clashes with a limiting 'with us or against us' mentality. And for all of the flaws of both Lions for Lambs and Redacted, the very nature of these flaws illuminate just how difficult it is to make sense of the chaos that surrounds us; the truth itself is often fragmented, contradictory, and confusing. Lambs invites us to think more, Redacted forces us to feel. And No End in Sight should be mandatory viewing, a primer shown in schools, discussed around dinner tables. The collective guilt of knowing can't be enough to make us turn away from, or throw our arms up over, the truth of the present situation, and the one shaping our future.

Katje Richstatter is a fiction and culture writer whose work has appeared in the Utne Reader, Punk Planet, SOMA, the SF Bay Guardian, and Tikkun. She is on the editorial board for Turning Wheel, the magazine of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship.

Richstatter, Katje. 2008. No good answers left. Tikkun 23(1):75-77.