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GREEN ZONE
(***˝)
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Movie Review by:
Jim "Good Old JR" Rutkowski
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Directed by:
Paul Greengrass |
Written by:
Screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on
book: "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone" by Rajiv
Chandrasekaran |
Starring:
Matt Damon, Amy Ryan, Greg Kinnear |
Running time:
155 minutes
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Released:
03/12/10 |
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Rated R
for violence and
language. |
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"...a heart-jacking action film that manages to engage in a direct and
intelligent way with the causes of the war and its at-any-price mission to
depose Saddam Hussein"
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A fictionalized action film shot with documentary
realism exploring the fictionalized intelligence that led to a very real war –
it's not hard to see what drew director Paul Greengrass to Green Zone. Set
during the first months of the Iraq war when the weapons of mass destruction
used to justify the American-led invasion failed to materialize, the film allows
Greengrass to deploy the breathless thrills of his Matt Damon-starring spy
thrillers The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum in the kind of
real-world setting favoured by his politically resonant docudramas Bloody Sunday
and United 93. The result is a heart-jacking action film that manages to engage
in a direct and intelligent way with the causes of the war and its at-any-price
mission to depose Saddam Hussein.
That's a tough trick to pull off, but Greengrass – reuniting with Damon – does
so with plenty of verve, plunging us into the chaos of the conflict in its
earliest days and gradually pulling into focus a clear-headed narrative of what
might have happened as a way of making us think about what did happen.
Our entry point is Damon's Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, a high ranking US
combatant assigned to find and secure Saddam's chemical weapons cache using
Pentagon-approved "raw intel". With the eyes of the world watching, Miller is
finding it increasingly difficult to hide his frustration when his unit
repeatedly comes up empty-handed as they scour the empty silos and bunkers
flagged up in the intelligence reports.
Told by his superiors to keep his mouth shut, he finds his inquisitorial
attitude brings him to the attention of CIA specialist Martin Brown (Brendan
Gleeson), a veteran of the region whose understanding of Iraq's ethnic,
religious and political complexities are dismissed by unscrupulous Pentagon
pencil-pusher Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) as the damaging "pre-conceived
ideas" standing in the way of a new democracy being forged in America's image.
That kind of hubris is at the heart of Green Zone. Loosely inspired by
Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran's non-fiction book Imperial Life
in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, the film infuses fiction with
fact, creating a gripping conspiracy thriller that has the ring of truth about
it. The disconnect that existed between the US bureau officials living like
kings in the heavily fortified luxury of Saddam's palace (the titular Green
Zone) and the lawless realities on the streets of Baghdad and beyond, is briefly
but potently highlighted when Miller is summoned to the palace only to find
bikini-clad staffers lounging around a pool while other administrators chow down
on Domino's pizza and beer. Greengrass, a master of telescoping intricate detail
into seconds of screen time, lets these bizarre images speak for themselves,
implying rather than stating outright the dangerous, damaging practice of
creating strategy and policy in a vacuum.
Yet he's also canny enough to use such scenes to foreground the less obvious
disconnect that exists between frontline soldiers like Miller and the Iraqis
they genuinely believe they're there to help. When Freddy (Khalid Abdalla), a
friendly, crippled veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, begins supplying Miller with
genuine intel that might help him uncover the truth about WMD, the reality of
what Miller comes to understand as "tough choices" facing the US mission in Iraq
turns out to have very different implications for those who've spent their lives
there. These grey areas certainly help give the relentlessly fast-paced Green
Zone enough substance to justify its amped-up action, which Greengrass takes to
new levels of vertiginous vérité.
Though his film-making approach might have been in danger of being devalued by
all the inferior rip-offs that have sprung up in recent years, he really does
kick things up a gear here, bathing the full-tilt night-time chase through
Baghdad's back-alleys that climaxes the film in a fuzzy, night-vision green that
genius cameraman Barry Ackroyd uses to complement his tight, claustrophobic
framing. It immerses us in the moment in a way 3D can only dream about. As do
the performances, which imbue the economically sketched characters with enough
meat to make them more than mere ciphers. Damon is particularly good. Stripped
of Bourne's preternatural ass-kicking talents, but retaining the weary
disposition of a patriot realizing that his core beliefs aren't as morally sound
as he once thought, he puts a credibly human face on modern warfare without
passing judgment on the character.
Inevitably some will call Greengrass on the boo-hiss obviousness of Kinnear's
Machiavellian defense intelligence agent, but a quick scan of real guys in the
Bush administration who ran the war confirms he's not a figment of some
Hollywood screenwriter's imagination and Kinnear makes him a believable bad guy.
Even Amy Ryan, charged with the rather thankless task of playing an exposition-
facilitating journalist, uses her limited screen time to present us with a
compromised professional whose guilt at allowing herself to be co-opted by the
administration for the sake of a story haunts her every waking moment.
It could be argued that hindsight has robbed the film, which has been three
years in the making, of a little of its power. However, the flip-side is that
recent history has loaded Green Zone with dramatic irony, ensuring that even the
coda, which at first glance seems naive and optimistic, suddenly becomes a
depressing acknowledgment that getting the story straight is no guarantee that
truth will prevail. |
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GREEN ZONE © 2010 Universal
Pictures
All Rights Reserved
Review © 2010 Alternate Reality, Inc.
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