Reviews
Green Zone
March 12 2010
Paul Greengrass
Starring Matt Damon, Brendan Gleeson, Khalid Abdalla
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With United 93, Paul Greengrass created an American myth. He envisaged an alternative reality that transposed itself into the public conscience as the redemptive lining of the 9/11 story.
There is no way of knowing exactly what transpired aboard the hijacked airplane as it flew towards the Capitol, but we now accept with utter conviction that it was at this point, an hour after the first plane hit, that the American people started to fight back. With his relentlessly stylised, raw mosaic of docudrama, Greengrass actualised a fiction, or fictionalised an actuality.
That fight continues today on different fronts, allowing Greengrass to repeat the illusion. Green Zone (based on the revealing book by The Washington Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran) refers to the insulated command HQ surrounding Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad palace. As such, the film strikes at the dark heart of the occupation – the naive, hurried construction of a provisional democratic government and the wholly unintelligent intelligence on which the troops based their fruitless and often fatal search for WMDs.
Matt Damon’s Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller is head of a squadron whose sole task is to find Saddam’s illegal weapons. Searching instead for an explanation, Miller begins to ask questions above his position in the chain of command, and so starts to unpick a tangled knot of governmental interests as much at war with each other as the country they occupy, and every bit as chaotic as the streets of the Iraqi capital.
Damon, with his serious star pedigree and burly physical presence, seamlessly convinces as an all-American hero. Miller is no Sergeant Elias, nor a Captain Willard. He is pragmatic, principled, his moral compass perfectly balanced. By lionising this individual, Greengrass lucidly articulates an establishment pock-marked by hubris, deception and dogmatism.
Miller is assisted by an Iraqi known as ‘Freddy’, performed superbly by Scottish-Egyptian actor Khalid Abdalla, who played one of the hijackers in United 93. Here, however, he is nervously willing to help the Americans in the tentative hope of a brighter future. His role in Miller’s quest offers a crucial reminder of what is at stake; an emotional attachment to a violently anarchic vista.
Filmed in Morocco, Spain and England, the creation of a Baghdad obliterated by Operation Iraqi Freedom is wholly believable. It is testament to Greengrass that he can be regarded as an auteur while wielding such massive budgets, and his signature is stamped all over Green Zone. This is a populist film anchored to a thoughtful, liberal base. He is Bay with a brain.
His agenda is apparent if reasonably unobtrusive. Greengrass has largely avoided the moral equivocations of other fence-straddling, pro-American, anti-Iraq films like Rendition, Redacted and Lions For Lambs. Nakedly broad in appeal and ambition, Green Zone offers a version of filmic truth in a place beset by confusion, deception and misdirection. It is a welcome addition to an ongoing post-mortem.
Anticipation:
Enjoyment:
In Retrospect:
I really wanted to like Green Zone. In a way, I'm glad the critical consensus has been so mixed because if I'd gone in expecting it to be brilliant I think I'd have been disappointed. While the action scenes were all present and correct – albeit lacking some of the pulsating tension of the Bourne movies – the politics of the film really turned me off. I'm not a mouth-foaming reactionary by any means, but I felt it drew entirely too simplistic a picture of the war. It had all the depth of a shouty Question Time audience member. It's fine to have the militaristic state be the enemy when your film is a colouring book like Avatar, but it risks being offensive, or at the very least naive, when you're dealing with a conflict that is not black, nor white, but any one of a thousand shades of grey.
Written by Dan Stewart on March 16th, 2010 at 17:08
Yeah I see what you're saying. It's a question I considered for a while as I wrote the review. I came to the conclusion that if we jumped on every film that reconstructs history but doesn't acknowledge every nuance, then after a while there'd be no-one portraying real events anymore – just pure docs and pure fiction.
Take Schindler's List. It's an American film with a European art house aesthetic, it has a framing narrative, famous actors and a sentimental ending; already you have layers and layers of artifice distancing the audience from the realities of the actual event. It was torn apart by academics. But, loads and loads and loads of people of my generation saw it, and thus got an insight into the holocaust they wouldn't have had before. That's worth a lot more than a bunch of University polemics.
I think as an audience we've got to acknowledge the limitations of the medium. Green Zone is a film designed for the Bourne audience, with the politics almost tacked on. As I said in the review, there's a sense of liberal appeasement there (Greengrass said he wanted to make the film because he genuinely believed Blair and felt betrayed). But I'm ok with that, because a few more people who aren't very engaged with the politics might understand some of the key factors behind the whole Iraq debacle, and then you have a more informed electorate.
This article expresses what I'm trying to say much better than I currently am:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/...
Written by Tom on March 16th, 2010 at 18:22