Matching the lack of will (or is it complicity?) on the part of the Democratic House, the movie industry doesn’t quite know what to do with the current Gulf War. A recent surge of films on the subject shows confusion, lack of commitment, and self-censorship.

Two of them bear a Peter Berg (the actor and director) - Matthew Michael Carnahan (screenwriter and brother of director Joe Carnahan) connection; two of them have a Meryl Streep connection. All three are vague and inconclusive.

The Kingdom is written by Carnahan and directed by Berg in the same style he brought to Friday Night Lights. It’s a sort of Soderberghesque manner with non-stop humming music and a roving, restless, jittery camera that suggests realism. Unfortunately, this technique here, as in the movie version of Lights, has the curious affect of distancing you from the action, shutting out the viewer and There is a key moment in The Kingdom that could stand in for all of these movies; Jamie Foxx leans over to a weeping Jennifer Garner during a big briefing and whispers something to her. We don’t learn what he said until the end and even then we don’t know what it was suppose to mean at the time or now. All of these movies are unwilling to say directly what they want to say, assuming that they have something to say.

A murder mystery set in the world of terrorism, The Kingdom concerns a group of oddly militaristic FBI agents sent to Saudi Arabia to investigate the terrorist bombing of a group of Americans working there. Foxx is the leader. He has to grapple with local resistance and intricate customs. Eventually he and his team track down the group or family involved in the terrorist attack, which appears to have been staged like a performance piece for a group of onlookers a short distance away. In the middle the film stages a chase and shootout on a freeway, like so many recent films, and ends with a lengthy shootout that evokes memories of Children of Men among so many other movies. The film also cites the Daniel Pearl case with its threat of a taped beheading. The film appears to make no explicit political statement but is vaguely right wing if only in its stand on shootouts and violence as the solution to political problems. The film moves in large action scenes interrupted with talky plot development scenes that are themselves mingled with “getting to know the quirky team” moments. The film ends with the viewer not knowing what really happened in its last 90 minutes. The Kingdom was finished earlier in the year but ended up undergoing some editing and an ending change. In other words, “meaning” and the film’s point were flexible enough to bear modification. What could or should have been a gripping murder mystery in a tense context, or a rah rah tale not unlike William Friedkin’s Rules of Engagement, turned into a confused, compromised narrative without focus.

Lions for Lambs tells three almost-real-time stories that appear to be occurring simultaneously. In story one, reporter Janine Roth (Meryl Streep) is summoned by Republican senator Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise) as a conduit for information about a new approach to fighting in Afghanistan; in the second story, special forces in that country seem to be implementing the surge that Senator Irving is leaking to Roth (this section amounts to a dull story about wounded guys getting stuck behind enemy lines); and finally, in the third story, a college professor, Stephen Malley (a weird looking Robert Redford, who also directed the movie from a script credited, again, to Matthew Michael Carnahan) holds a student conference with a promising but disappointing student, Todd Hayes (Andrew Garfield), and in the course of his vague recruiting pitch tells the callow, hedonistic youth the story of Ernest (Michael Pena) and Arian Finch (Derek Luke), former students who volunteered and are currently fighting in Afghanistan. In fact, it turns out that they are part of the surge and indeed are the two stranded soldiers.

The lack of specificity in these movies is maddening. It is not clear what Redford teaches. The mission of the strike team is not clear, nor where they landed. The cutting back and forth between the three locations is meant to be “ironical” in the (misused) Hollywood sense of the word, and it occurred to me later that it is probably suppose to be a surprise that the two prize students, who are “ethnic” and “ironically” more eager to fight for their country than the hedonistic Hayes, are the two soldiers. Why is Senator Irving leaking this policy change to a reporter, not a member of the president’s staff? Like the Soderbergh-directed Traffic and Soderbergh-produced Syriana, Lions follows multiple story lines, but there is little if any action, and the film is cast in the tone of a debate play. The dialogue is often quite good and quite well acted by most of the cast, especially Streep and Cruise, but the film’s ultimate point is unclear. Redford’s prof is surprisingly unintellectual. He tells the student that “words need a heartbeat, experience.” This segment of the movie comes across like a pious version of Hitchcock’s Rope, and Redford’s idea of “teaching” is to set up a debate in the classroom and then look with hard expectancy to see how people react to others’ points. Redford’s philosophy is vague (”Rome is burning, son”), and we don’t know exactly what he is arguing, except that it might be some kind of recruitment pitch.

Cruise’s senator makes a good case in his pitch, and points out quite accurately that today’s mass media is “a wind sock.” The movie is careful to give his senator a military background, and he comes across like Cadet Captain David Shawn if he hadn’t been killed off in Taps. But Cruise’s appealing earnestness and Streep’s realism can’t save the film. Lions for Lambs ends inconclusively and even open-endedly. I wish that different people had directed the film’s three sections, for example John Milius the Cruise debate, James Cameron the Afghanistan section, and Sidney Pollack the Redford tale. Peter Berg pops up as the leader of the Afghan strike force.

Rendition jumps around from one international location to another, and feels just as meandering and unfocused. The setup is simple in director Gavin Hood’s (Tsotsi and credited neophyte screenwriter Kelley Sane’s tale. Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally) is flying back to America from South Africa. He is an Egyptian married to a pregnant American woman, Isabella Fields El-Ibrahimi (Reese Witherspoon). On the orders of Corrine Whitman (Streep again), whose official position is, as usual, vague, Ibrahimi is pulled out of the airport by the CIA, which whisks him away to a foreign nation where he is tortured in order to get the names and numbers he supposedly retains. There, a raw bureaucrat with a conscience, Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal), questions the efficacy of torture as an information tool (he takes matters into his own hands somewhat in the manner of the Ulrich Muhe character in The Lives of Others ), though to the wrong guy, the prime torturer himself, who is basically just in it for the job.

Isabella uses an ex-boyfriend to try to find out the location of her husband. He is Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard), aide to her state’s senator (Alan Arkin). He butts up against the brick wall that is Whitman (by the way, Streep is terrible in the role, such a sad contrast to her work in Lions). There is a third story which has to do with the daughter of the torturer having a romance with a local Islamic radical, who is using her to get to and stop her father. As in Amores Perros, 13 Conversations About One Thing (which also starred Arkin), and other recent “web of life” films, it turns out that the three stories are told in a staggered time frames. But as usual, crucial details are kept cloaked or unspecific, to no end. The tale also wraps on a note that leaves too many questions about what happens next.

The film I expected to like the least turned out to be the best of the lot. In the Valley of Elah is written and director by the Oscar-anointed Paul Haggis, whose Crash was a blend of the stiffly well-meaning and the emotionally moving. Early reviews were not promising, noting its slow pace, and characterizing it as plodding and glum. Maybe it just hit me right after seeing three previous confused and confusing films about the Iraq war.

Set in 2004, just about a year after the war starts, the film concerns the efforts of Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones), a former Army MP who now hauls gravel in Tennessee, to find out why his son Michael (Jonathan Tucker) went AWOL shortly after returning from the Middle East. Hank drives to Fort Rudd in New Mexico where Michael was last seen, and shortly thereafter things take a turn for the worse. Eventually Det. Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), a recently promoted detective, comes to his aid, and in the course of their investigation are given the chance to look deep into the abyss of the human psyche damaged by war.

I appreciated its thoughtful pace, and the time it gave to Jones and Theron to communicate to the viewer visually instead of always via dialogue. The acting is powerful and subtle throughout, and the photography by Roger Deakins, who just shot Jones and Josh Brolin (who has a small part) in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men paradoxically captures the chill and silence of the desert. Maybe I’m just a sap, but I felt myself on the verge of tears throughout the film’s second half, and the quiet, hopeless gesture of the film’s last shot is overwhelming.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 8:16 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.