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Not least among reasons for "The Hurt Locker's" Oscar-laden upset triumph was the film's refusal to take a position on -- or really, even allude to -- the raging political issues surrounding the war in Iraq. Prior to last Sunday, the Iraq War (like the Vietnam War in its day) was generally viewed as a surefire kiss of box-office death.
Now, close on "Hurt's" heels, comes "The Green Zone," a Baghdad action thriller with a front-and-center political agenda. The two pictures share a hostile combat environment, but a consciousness-raising character study in the "Locker" gives way to shoot-'em-up intrigue in the "Zone."
Tough question: Fact or fiction?
Tough answer: Both.
Depending on your point of view, "Green Zone" is either based on or "inspired by" -- there's a difference -- "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone," the 2006 nonfiction best-seller by Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran, chronicling the first year of the American occupation spent in fruitless pursuit of WMD and U.S. policy goals at the expense of urgent Iraqi social and civilian security needs.
- Starring: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson.
- Rating: R for violence and language.
- Web site: www.greenzonemovie.com/
This much, in the book and film alike, is indisputable fact -- and Oz-like, indeed: The Wizard-in-Chief in Washington installs deputy wizard L. Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority in Saddam Hussein's former Republican Palace, a luxurious compound with swimming pools and amenities galore, with orders to forge a new democratic Iraq -- not in the real red-hot oven outside but by microwaving it inside the Green Zone in a hurry.
Enter our fictional hero, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (busy Matt Damon, fresh from "Invictus" and "The Informant!"), who with his gung-ho team of inspectors has been assigned to tiptoe through the booby-trapped tulips and find all the WMD stockpiles, reported by all the "reliable sources," that justified the U.S. invasion.
In the film's fine, fiery opening, Miller and his men take out a dug-in sniper to secure a major WMD cache -- which doesn't exist. Site after site, in battle after battle, likewise produces nothing. Frustrated Miller starts to Question Authority about the faulty intel but gets no good answers from:
• The Defense Department intelligence liaison Clark Poundstone (normally affable Greg Kinnear, playing villainous against type), who keeps mouthing the "democracy is messy" mantra, oblivious to the civil-war chaos beyond the Green Zone.
• The CIA station Chief (scruffy Brendan Gleeson), a bitter turf-war rival of Poundstone.
• The pushy Wall Street Journal reporter (Amy Ryan), who won't reveal her "reliable" WMD source to Miller.
In a running (intentional or unintentional) gag, none of them gives our hero much information, but all of them give him their card and cliche: "If you change your mind, give me a call." Better info comes with his impulsive decision -- in mid-firefight -- to trust a one-legged civilian (Khalid Abdalla) as his key informant-translator thereafter.
Mr. Damon, the amnesiac super-agent of several "Bourne" ultimatums, reteams comfortably here with director Paul Greengrass ("Bloody Sunday," "United 93") in a screenplay by Brian Helgeland (Oscar winner for "L.A. Confidential") that creates fictional characters but preserves the factual predicament: U.S. staffers, chosen not for any expertise but for hygienic views on irrelevant matters compatible with their leaders' ignorance of the country they blasted and blundered into -- culminating in the disastrous decision to dissolve all military and police infrastructures that had held the fractious nation together.
In the face of that, what can lone-ranger Miller do but go rogue? Everybody else has done so here at the All-Rogue, All-the-Time Station: the suited diplomats, the CIA, the Special Forces, those Baathist generals in that "wanted" deck of cards, the pro- and anti-Saddam Iraqis. With such repellent candidates, can we really find ourselves rooting for the CIA?
In any case, we find ourselves held by the fast-paced action and suspenseful -- if sometimes silly -- momentum. (When the locals yell, "The Americans are coming!" you can't help but think of the Redcoats.) Rabat and Morocco are a credible substitution for Baghdad and Iraq, though Barry Ackroyd's ("Hurt Locker," "United 93") vertiginous hand-held cinematography is problematic, and I don't envy the editor's Dramamine-demanding job of splicing together Mr. Ackroyd's frenzied, jerky snippets.
"Green Zone" is comparable in many ways to such Oliver Stone conspiracy-theory political thrillers as "JFK," but with one crucial difference: The non-existence of WMDs is not a "theory." It turned out to be a very embarrassing fact. But a deliberately false basis for selling the war to Congress and the American public -- a conspiracy, or just a confederacy of dunces?
The Bush administration's vs. the soldier's conflicting view is crisply summed up in an exchange between the Special Forces chief and Miller:
"WMD doesn't matter any more," says the former.
"The reasons we go to war always matter," replies the latter.
The soldier is right. The crucial issue is, when does self-delusion -- and deluding the public -- cross the line from "victim of bad intel" to "guilty of lying"?
"Green Zone," while far from perfect, deserves kudos -- and a viewing -- for at least addressing, if not definitively answering, that question.
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