Green Zone: Bourne-Type Action Belies Thoughtful Look At War

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LE Newsletter - March 18, 2010

Green Zone: Bourne-Type Action Belies Thoughtful Look At War

Source: www.thestar.com - Peter Howell

Green Zone

(out of four)
Starring Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson and Amy Ryan.

(March 12, 2010) If the vertigo doesn't get you in Green Zone, the paranoia just might.

Paul Greengrass moves the camera like a dog gnawing on a bone in this Iraq War thriller, creating disorientation that some viewers might find intolerable. But what the director and his favourite accomplice Matt Damon really hope to do is shake up anybody who still holds Pollyanna views about America's unhappy meddling in Middle East affairs.

"Don't be naïve," major characters take turns telling each other, and that's also the film's defining sentiment. Green Zone has an attitude – it persuades in almost documentary style that the war was sold on false pretences but no one's motives in this tangled affair can be completely trusted. Neither hawks nor doves can take comfort in the story. In this way, the movie suggests that Iraq War films have come of age, much like their Vietnam predecessors.

In the decade spanning John Wayne's brute jingoism in The Green Berets (1968) to the deep regrets of Coming Home (1978), Americans shifted and sharpened their attitudes toward the Southeast Asian conflict. Films like Green Zone and Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker take a much deeper look at all aspects of the Iraq battle than we've seen in earlier treatments.

Greengrass is part journalist and part action filmmaker, switching between docudramas such as United 93 to commercial blockbusters like the two Jason Bourne movies he's made with Damon. Both sides of Greengrass's personality are on display in Green Zone, which many people will understandably think of as "Bourne goes to Baghdad," especially in the film's more explosive second half.

First and foremost, though, the intention is to thoroughly illustrate and excoriate the American decision to pursue a war based on the flimsy evidence.

The film opens with an effectively staged recreation of the "shock and awe" aerial bombings of Baghdad that began the Iraq conflict in March 2003, a time when most people professed to believe the Bush Administration's contention that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was concealing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that he intended to use.

One of the believers is Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Damon), a U.S. Army stalwart tasked with rooting out and destroying WMD sites. This seems an almost comical job, viewed through the 20/20 lens of history, but Miller is convinced that the "intel" on the WMDs is reliable and he intends to follow orders, no matter what the risk. He and his men stage commando-style raids on supposed WMD hideouts.

When bust after bust comes up snake eyes – they break into a toilet factory at one point – Miller starts becoming disillusioned about his work and suspicious of the reasons for it. His eyebrow rises further after a cynical colleague tells him it doesn't matter whether the WMDS are real or not, because the brass back in Washington doesn't require truth: "All they're interested in is finding something they can hold up on CNN."

Miller isn't alone in his doubts. Wall Street Journal reporter Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan) has similar suspicions, and so does CIA operative Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), who has been in the Middle East long enough to know that not all of Saddam's men supported the deposed leader. Brown believes key members of Saddam's Republican Guard must be conscripted to assist in the rebuilding efforts, or else Iraq will quickly dissolve into anarchy. At the very least, the Americans will quickly lose the faith of the Iraqi people, if they blunder into the country without some knowledge of how it works – and there's certainly been no shortage of blunders.

To underline these points, and to advance the plot, we see a secret meeting with Iraqi renegades – including a top Saddam general – discussing whether to cut a deal with the Americans or to launch an insurgency movement against them.

Much of this is informed by knowledge of how things actually turned out, which makes Miller and his fellow travellers seem a little too prescient to be believed. But Greengrass and screenwriter Brian Helgeland, who has freely adapted Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, aren't seeking to make the angels and demons too obvious.

Greg Kinnear's Pentagon apparatchik Clark Poundstone is the most obvious villain of the piece, since he's pursuing the official line and attempting to thwart Miller's quest for the truth. Yet he seems to sincerely believe that the WMDs are out there, and it's only a matter of time before they are unearthed and that President Bush's ill-advised declaration of "mission accomplished" will be vindicated. Poundstone's answer for all the screw-ups? "Democracy is messy."

We also meet an Iraqi collaborator (Khalid Abdalla) who is perhaps too eager to help Miller in his quest for the truth. Or maybe we should believe him when he insists, "I want to help my country."

Damon acquits himself beautifully as Miller, convincingly playing a righteous Army renegade – he seems to have lowered his voice an octave to punch home his words.

It's only when Green Zone devolves into straight Bourne kinetics in the latter going that the film starts to seem less thoughtful and more commercial. Yet it still manages to drive home Miller's essential truth: "The reasons we go to war always matter."