Green Zone
Fiery explosions rock Baghdad. A soldier tosses a water bottle to an onlooker as his convoy passes by. Looters rifle through a site reportedly harboring weapons of mass destruction. Director Paul Greengrass very quickly establishes the mood in Iraq, just days before President Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner flaunted an “end” to major ground combat in the region. In retrospect, we the audience know how amusing and disconcerting this show of bravado was.
The film tells the story of Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon), assigned to Mobile Exploration Team Delta (MET D) during the initial occupation of Baghdad in 2003. Upon discovering no weapons of mass destruction at various sites in the Adhamiya and Al Mansour districts of the city, Chief Miller begins to question his superiors about the quality of intelligence reports. At one such briefing, he’s immediately shut down. Says one officer, “We’ll make sure that you had the right information.” He’s not so much assuring an inquiry into the problem as he is implying the problem could only be that Miller had the wrong reports. The intelligence has been “vetted,” they say. Therefore it must be correct.
Chief Miller’s investigation into the facts leads him down two important corridors. He encounters a young man, Freddy (Khalid Abdallah), who notices an unusually secretive gathering of well-heeled men at a safehouse. Aside from providing some comic relief, Freddy represents the average man in Iraq who has no truck with politicians or warmongers. Freddy just wants whats best for his country. He wears a prosthetic leg, discovered by Miller’s men in one of several chase sequences. When asked about what happened, he poignantly replies, “My leg is in Iran… since 1987.” If Freddy is a rational center, then he is flanked by two extremes: Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan), an opportunistic writer for the Wall Street Journal who seems more interested getting the scoop than the far-reaching implications of what’s actually happening on the ground. At the opposite end is a CIA field operations man, Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), trying to piece together the story himself in order to broker a backdoor deal with Ba’athist generals in exile including Saddam Hussein’s former top general, Mohammed Al Rawi (Igal Naor). Brown’s reasoning is that these men can maintain the necessary domestic security to keep the country from ripping itself apart. That plan is upended when intelligence official Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), under orders from the White House, disbands the Iraqi military and security forces.
There are several things going on in Mr. Greengrass’ film. Having directed both the spy-genre thriller Bourne series, and the semi-biographical United 93—concerning the passengers on the ill-fated Sept. 11, 2001, flight that crashed in Pennsylvania—Mr. Greengrass makes us acutely aware of politics, career jockeying and those who get caught, like Freddy, in the middle of all the scheming. Journalism in the age of the twenty-four hour news cycle is as ethically bankrupt as politics. If Ms. Dayne doesn’t get the scoop on Magellan, the White House’s alleged source for WMD intelligence, someone else will. We’re informed, rather loudly, by her repeated looks of guilt that she should know better. But what investigative journalist at that level in the game stops to even contemplate what “better” is, let alone have a frame of reference for it in their cutthroat world? The sociopolitical commentary is only gnawing, not biting, and at the Bush administrations incompetence, backpedaling and lies—a subject already beaten to death in the mainstream media.
The intrigue arises when Brown enters the picture, picking out a vocal Miller at the intelligence briefing. He deputizes Miller to get closer to the truth by engaging Al Rawi directly. Mr. Gleeson gives us a solid mix of constant movement, agitation and paranoia in a character at odds with the party line. But falling back on his action thriller background, Mr. Greengrass diverges from the more interesting political questions and leans headlong into a seemingly-endless chase between Bourne, er, Miller and an unhinged Special Forces nutcase named Briggs—a handlebar-mustachioed Jason Isaacs playing all the right notes.
What Mr. Greengrass seems to want is a good follow-up to his two-sided style developed in United 93, in which we get to understand both the terrorists and the victims’ personalities and fears. They’re humanized so that we can realize no one comes out a winner in these scenarios. Here, only Freddy gets this treatment. But that’s easy enough. We’re swimming in a social climate that yearns to understand and empathize with the average guy from the country we’ve been bombing the hell out of for eight years—it’s about time. But the smug bastard Poundstone, whom writer Brian Helgeland didn’t even think to give any kind of job title, is too exaggerated a caricature of Bush administration officials. We don’t really get any insight into his whole being; what’s he like outside his job? What drives this man? Most people who do bad things rationalize them as the right choice. Where did this man take the wrong ethical turn and why? The film asks none of these questions.
That said, the movie succeeds at creating and sustaining a sense of urgency throughout most of its 115 minute running time. It isn’t a particularly intelligent thriller, though, and delivers so precisely what you expect it to that it almost feels like sitting through the most uncomfortable parts of the last decade just for the hell of it. While never truly boring, it’s a rehash of leaden archetypes of good and evil to suit an action-driven plot disguised as social commentary—hand-held shots abused to excess. If masochism is your thing, more power to you. But you aren’t likely to learn anything you hadn’t had the last seven years to contemplate while trying to sort out the myriad failures of a war whose critics knew it was about oil and whose increasingly sheepish supporters embraced that fact as though belligerence were a virtue.
Green Zone • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 • Running Time: 115 minutes • MPAA Rating: R for violence and language. • Distributed by Universal Pictures