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New Movie About Abu Ghraib Is Ponderous, Pretentious
Excerpts from a review, written by Elbert Ventura and published in The New Republic magazine, of the new documentary movie Standard Operating Procedure, about the Abu Ghraib scandal.... Forget the consensus: The Fog of War [a movie, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2003, about former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the Vietnam War] and Standard Operating Procedure (which won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival) are [Director Errol] Morris's two worst movies. Ponderous where they should be penetrating, ambiguous where they should be clear, Morris's Iraq-era docs highlight the weaknesses of his aesthetic and give us the worst of two worlds: pretentious cinema and bad journalism. .... One problem is Morris's interview style. "I try to ask no questions at all. The idea is to say as little as possible and let the person who I'm talking to do all of the talking," he once explained. Privileging subjective experience over objective reporting, he allows his interviewees to bloviate with little interruption or follow up. The tactic allows his subjects to gallop around in their heads -- and perhaps even trip themselves up with their own words. .... An incoherent mishmash of intimate profile, investigative reporting, and philosophical inquiry ... Morris's movie that tells us little that is new. SOP is structured around Morris's interviews with five of the seven "bad apples" who were indicted for their roles in the detainee abuse scandal. The movie argues that the guards caught in those photos were thrown under the bus by their superiors and the administration, an uncontroversial stance that Morris treats as breaking news. SOP achieves the admirable goal of humanizing the soldiers, of fleshing out the two-dimensional villains we saw in those photos. But if it's important to hear the guards' side of the story, it is also essential to approach it with a measure of skepticism. Morris seems to take everything they say at face value. His unblinking stare and unobtrusive interrogation provide his subjects a hospitable forum to make their case. Blame is apportioned to others: the higher-ups, fellow guards, other governmental agencies at Abu Ghraib. Mitigating factors are raised: the numbing routine of prison duty, the daily threats from outside and in. The overall effect is to make us sympathize with the guards, even as the movie does little to press them on their own accountability and reluctant remorse. It's telling that the soldiers who come off looking the worst, Charles Graner and Ivan Frederick, are the ones who don't get time on camera -- underscoring just how thoroughly the interviewees (some of whom dish on Graner and Frederick) have commandeered the movie's point of view. In the course of defending the guards as scapegoats for a corrupt policy, Morris ends up going easy on their own culpability. .... Too much of SOP is given over to ruminations about the nature of photography, the instability of images, and the elusiveness of truth -- none of which yield anything remotely revelatory. Enamored with epistemological ambiguities, Morris spends far too much time pondering pseudo-profound questions at the expense of finding concrete answers. .... Morris stuffs SOP with stylized reenactments, dramatizing events .... In one scene, a soldier recalls a drop of blood from a detainee landing on his shirt -- cue exquisitely lit shot of a perfect crimson orb plinking onto a uniform. In another scene that borders on self-parody, Morris illustrates an anecdote about Saddam Hussein making himself a fried egg with slow-mo shots of an egg being cracked open, dropped into a pan, and cooked in oil. .... Morris retains the qualities that distinguished his past movies: an ear for the loopy digression, an eye for the surreal in plain sight, a speculative turn of mind. But those same gifts begin to seem like flaws when the subject moves from freaks and geeks to war and torture. Prizing meditation over muckraking, Morris has made a movie that indulges his love for opacity and abstraction -- and fails our need to know. .... Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2008-04-27 |
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