At last a movie has wrestled with the bare bones of this puzzle.
"Green Zone" is a very good movie that asks and answers sharp questions that
have eluded resolution in the public forum. How much intelligence about weapons
of mass destruction did the Bush administration have in its hands when it
escalated the Iraq war in 2003? How much of what they had was accurate? How much
of it was manipulated to justify the administration's determination to eliminate
Sadaam Hussein? At last a movie has wrestled with the bare bones of this puzzle.
Paul
Greengrass, who directed "United 93" and the Bourne Identity movies, is an
action movie specialist who is supremely capable of holding an audience in his
clenched fist for two hours. He has constructed a taut story powered by the
violent street fighting in Iraq where Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt
Damon) leads his men in a fruitless search for WMD. After coming up empty for
the third dangerous time, Miller begins the search for answers among his
superiors. Why is there such a disconnect between the intelligence and what they
are seeing on the ground? Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) is the visiting
administration man sent from Washington to bring democracy to a country that has
not asked for it.
Martin Brown
(Brendan Gleeson) is a CIA man with 30 years experience in the Middle East. He
and Poundstone represent the traditional friction between CIA and the White
House. When Chief Miller makes contact with the experienced CIA man, the movie
flows into a search not for the non-existent WMD, but for the manipulators of
the misleading intelligence.
The casting
director gives us the gift of actors who don't look alike. The Americans are an
appropriately motley mix. Both they and the Iraqis come off as individuals,
sparing us that "who is that guy" feeling so common to action movies. Never once
breaking a smile, Matt Damon gives a performance that is at once spare and
driven and entirely devoid of histrionics. This holds true also of photographer
Barry Ackroyd's (The Hurt Locker) filming of the war. Scenes of civilian
casualties and torture by the Americans are disturbing and provocative, but are
not used as building blocks for an ideological case.
The strength
of the movie lies in diligent research. The filmmakers have constructed
carefully the landscape of the street war and even their fictionalized story
appears to hew closely to the facts that have already been published and
substantiated. While we are speculating about all this, we wonder how a brutal
seven years war could have been started, escalated, and fought without the
consent of Congress. Would the reality of the WMD debacle have come to light in
that debate? We can only wish, after absorbing the threads of duplicity that run
through both the facts and the fiction, that the big questions will be resolved
one day in the public forum. For the moment, both history buffs and lovers of
action movies are likely to be riveted by "Green Zone."
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