Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
3/14/10
The
old saying tells us that we have two choices where history is concerned:
learn from it or repeat it. That presupposes, of course, that history
isn't something you'd care to repeat and I'm pretty sure most of us agree
that the 2nd Iraq War from which we are now winding down is the kind of
thing we're in no hurry to do again. To that end, Paul Greengrass'
political action thriller Green Zone serves as a second act of sorts
to an Iraq War Mistakes trilogy, following United 93's litany of
errors that allowed 9/11 to happen. Set in the early days after the
whole Shock and Awe and pulling down Saddam's statue things had us thinking
we'd routed all Iraqi resistance, it tracks one soldier's self-appointed
mission to figure out what the heck happened to the WMDs while all around
him, as they say, mistakes are made. Filled with strong performances,
it's a great story, although Greengrass' action sequences tend to go on
and on. Just like the war.
Roy
Miller (Matt Damon) leads his squad into an unsecured area desperate to
reach a warehouse that's been identified as a repository of Weapons of
Mass Destruction before looters can empty it out. After taking out
a sniper, his men enter the building and find... nothing. It's been
the same at all the earlier sites they'd been to, and in fact no one has
been able to find the WMDs that would justify the United States invasion
of Iraq. When he speaks up at a briefing, he's approached by Martin
Brown (Brendan Gleeson) a CIA expert on the region who's had no luck persuading
the Pentagon's Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) that his vision of a rapidly
democratized nation is a fantasy. He adds Miller to his team and
sends him on the trail of “Magellan”, the anonymous source upon which Poundstone
based the reports of WMDs, released to the American public through journalist
Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan). He quickly learns the source's identity,
but bringing him in will not be easy, especially when Poundstone tasks
Delta Force Major Briggs (Jason Isaacs) with assuring that Magellan doesn't
live to tell anyone the story of their secret meetings.
Based
on/inspired by Rajiv Chandrasekaran's nonfiction book "Imperial Life in
the Emerald City", Green Zone takes an interesting approach to tracking
the decline and fall of first our belief in WMDs in Iraq and then our belief
that our government ever really had intelligence to that effect.
It pits a conventional “man of few words” action hero against the ever-shifting
ground of spin and nonsense that is modern public policy and just dares
him to do something about it. It's folly for Miller to believe he
can ever expose The Truth in a 24/7 cable news world where it could only
ever share a box next to some spin doctor selling his own Truth, but the
movie gets a lot of mileage out of the “I just wanna do what I was sent
here to do” purity of his quest to ask Magellan where those pesky weapons
are. In the process, he meets the political con men, ambitious reporters,
ask-no-questions military men and Saddam loyalists who made the Big Lie
possible. It's a solid structure that creates that rarest of action
movies, one with a plot about real-life public policy.
Pity
then that the action itself isn't more compelling. I'm not a fan
of Greengrass' chaotic shaky-cam style of shooting fights and chases, although
the cult of his Jason Bourne sequels will line up around the block to disagree
with me. While some of the early confrontations are sufficiently
tense and filled out with character and dialog to move effectively, a lengthy
climactic foot vs. car vs. helicopter showdown just goes on and on to the
point where I almost wanted to leave the director a message to give me
a call when the plot resumed. To the movie's credit, though, the
recreation of war-torn Iraq in Spain and Morocco is very effective, as
is the integration of stock footage to heighten the effect of actually
being there.
As
I mentioned, the performances are first-rate. Damon is at his best
as characters who're morally certain, and he does a great job mixing a
soldier's steely-eyed focus on what's right in front of him with the intellectual
curiosity the WMD shell game counted on few people sharing. Kinnear
walks just the right line between glad handing and backstabbing to give
us a sense of what kind of pie-in-the-sky morons really thought we'd be
in and out of Iraq with an American-style democracy in our wake within
a couple weeks. Igal Naor (so good as Rendition's
professional torturer) makes a perfect steely Ba'athist General, and Khalid
Abdalla is great in the pivotal role of the Iraqi citizen whose attempt
to pass along one piece of information to Miller sweeps him up in the net
of its outcome. Gleeson and Ryan don't have showy roles, but they
do a good job convincingly holding their jobs of poolside spook and reporter
who demands answers whenever it's convenient for you to give them.
It
was funny to listen to the uncomfortable rumblings through the crowd at
the theater where I saw Green Zone, located as I am in a fairly
conservative part of central Pennsylvania. While the movie's general
thrust that there were no WMDs and at least somebody in the US government
knew that very well before we marched into Iraq is almost impossible to
dispute, if you're still clinging to the notion that the only mistakes
made in Iraq were honest ones, you're probably not going to enjoy this
movie. On the other hand, if you're a Bush administration-hating
conspiracy nut (which, you know, I don't really prefer the term “nut”...),
it's going to hit an idealogical bullseye for you. For those in between,
it leaves enough wiggle room that you can blame the Clark Poundstones of
the world for this mess and assume W was just doing the best he could with
the information he had COUGHsuckerCOUGH.
Green
Zone provides yet another piece of the ever-expanding cinematic War
on Terror jigsaw puzzle, and while it mixes fact and fiction pretty liberally,
it provides a genre movie “in” to the conversation that most of its counterparts
lack. A sort of compromise between United 93 and The Bourne
Supremacy, it also allows Paul Greengrass a forum to keep asking those
hard questions about not only who knew what and when, but why we believed
they did. And stuff blows up. |
