"Green Zone" Shocks and Occasionally Awes

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 13 March 2010 15:28

Written by Maitland McDonagh / Miss FlickChick

Directed by Paul Greengrass
Written by Brian Helgeland, inspired by Rajiv Chandrasekaran's nonfiction Imperial Life in the Emerald City
Starring Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson, Amy Ryan, Yigal Naor, Khalid Abdalla

Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker (2008; U.S. release 2009) earned overwhelming positive reviews, in part by shoving the polarizing politics of America's Iraq war into the background. Irish director Paul Greengrass' Green Zone wears its politics on its sleeve, a nervy stance for a $100 million, major-studio thriller starring Matt Damon, since mainstream audiences of all ideological persuasions have so assiduously avoided movies about Iraq and the war on terror, from Brian De Palma's Redacted (2007) to Ridley Scott's Body of Lies (2008). Even the lauded Hurt Locker couldn't recoup its $15 million cost after six months in release.

Baghdad, 2003: One month after the "shock and awe" invasion, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) and his team are on the front lines of the search for deposed dictator Saddam Hussein's vast weapons stockpile — it was, after all, the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that justified American military intervention. But all they find is abandoned toilet factories, where the only biological threat is years' worth of calcified pigeon droppings.

Though military to the core, Miller can't help wondering whether there's something fishy about the intelligence. But Miller's questions are casually dismissed by his superiors, defense department weasel Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) and even his own men, who toe the "ours is not to reason why" line. The only sympathetic ear is cynical CIA operative Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), an old Middle-East hand whose warnings that American's plans to bring democracy to Iraq, starting with the installation of a puppet leader with strong Pentagon ties, guarantee that Iraq will quickly descend into civil war between rival Ba'athist, Sunni and Kurdish factions whose longtime animosities were kept in check by Saddam's brutal regime, are routinely ignored. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reporter Lawrie Dane (Amy Ryan), who traded her integrity for exclusives, has begun to harbor her own suspicions about the top-secret informer codenamed Magellan, the Pentagon's primary source of information.

In the middle of yet another fruitless search for WMDs, an Iraqi civilian (Khalid Abdalla) alerts Miller off to a nearby meeting of high-level Ba'athist military officers; Miller gambles on his veracity and comes away with a glimpse of the fugitive General Al Rawi (Yigal Naor) and a notebook that everyone seems to want. The more Miller learns about the deals, agendas and compromises behind the carefully managed facade of Iraq's liberation, the closer he's drawn to a showdown between loyalty and principals.

Greengrass is a bold, visceral director, as comfortable with using hand-held camera and frenetic editing to give fact-based narratives like United 93 (2003) the urgency of fiction and lend espionage fantasies like the Bourne movies a discomfiting air of reality. Unfortunately, Brian Helgeland's screenplay inspired by Washington Post editor Rajiv Chandrasekaran's scathing 2006 account of the machinations within Baghdad's heavily fortified green zone, where American administrators made key decisions about Iraq's future, relies so heavily on conspiracy clichés that it's easy to lose sight of how much fact is been woven into the fiction.

I imagine the filmmakers' intent was to use the conventions of action-packed entertainment to stimulate serious discussion about America's intentions and actions in Iraq, but I doubt that Green Zone will. The subject is so irrationally polarizing that it's more likely to reinforce existing opinions and fuel furious rants about liberal media and Hollywood leftists.

For more by Maitland McDonagh: MissFlickChick.com

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