I saw "The Green Zone" this weekend. Essentially, as AO Scott noted, the film did a pretty decent job of distilling the events and politics of wartime Bagdhad into the action/thriller genre:
To anyone who was paying attention in 2003 and after, this is familiar territory. Mr. Greengrass and the screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, deftly glean material from the historical record, and while they compress, simplify and invent according to the imperatives of the genre - this is a thriller, not a documentary - they do so with seriousness and an impressive sense of scruples. They have clearly studied journalistic accounts of the early days of the war, citing Rajiv Chandrasekaran's vivid "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" as a particular inspiration, and while the picture they paint of infighting among the Americans and growing factionalism among the Iraqis may not be literally accurate in every particular, it has the rough authority of novelistic truth.
At the movie's core is the discovery by an Army officer, played by Matt Damon, that the US government's justification for invasion - Iraqi WMDs - was manufactured.
And watching it made me feel outraged all over again. If anything, the movie should be a reminder of how awful, how devastatingly awful the last administration was, how sick the invasion was, how wrong its supporters were - especially after it was evident it was a sham, a setup, a con job.
Naturally the movie is irking conservatives, who are busy trying to resurrect Bush's reputation. Ross Douthat takes a novel approach for a conservative, and pines for someone to depict the "complexities" of the war, instead of turning it into some over-simplistic story of good vs evil. ("If only Hollywood could be more like George W Bush," writes FDL's Blue Texan, "and embrace a sophisticated, nuanced, shades-of-gray type of worldview - rather than so clumsily dividing the world into good and evil." Or read Daniel Larison's complete smackdown of Douthat.)
Of course, in a way - and not the way Douthat intends - the move is a little over simplistic. For starters, in "The Green Zone," there's much surprise when no WMDs are found and there's shock when it's revealed that the administration had a hand in manufacturing WMD intelligence. Of course, by the invasion, it was pretty clear that there were no WMDs in Iraq, and that the intelligence from the Pentagon was suspect, to say the least.
That is, the move is an over-simplistic flick that augurs how the American public will remember the war, how most are already processing it. Basically, people are remembering that they were hoodwinked, when, in fact, most people had the evidence, heard the dissenting voices, and still supported the war. The public and the media galloped headlong towards Iraq under Bush's banner willingly, despite the plethora of reasonable and well-informed voices that showed there was nothing there...
So, yeah. It p*ssed me off. |
