Bomb Over Baghdad

The Situation's lack of focus is a testament to its source material.

by Sam Adams

PLAIN DANE: War journalist Anna Molyneux (Connie Nielsen) is more of an idea than a full-blooded character. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

War, General Sherman had it, is hell. But the war in Iraq — a conflict with no clear objectives, no fixed enemy and only a location to give it an identity — is something else. The characters in Philip Haas' black-bag thriller call it simply "the situation," a term that makes it sound like they know what they're talking about without grounding them to any particular view of the world.

In The Situation, which Haas directed from a script by journalist Wendell Steavenson, allegiances shift so fast it's impossible for anyone to keep up. There's no solid ground, no sense of right or wrong, or even a sense that right and wrong still exist. It's not hell — it's the situation.

Steavenson's script focuses on characters pulled in opposite directions: Dan Murphy (Damian Lewis), an American intelligence officer who believes the best chance for stability is strengthening ties with insurgent leaders; Anna Molyneux (Connie Nielsen), a disillusioned journalist who finds that the everyday horrors of roadside bombings and civilian deaths have become too commonplace to qualify as "news"; and Zaid (Mido Hamada), a Christian Iraqi who works as Anna's photographer and sometime translator.

The event that stirs the pot is the death of a young Iraqi boy, who drowns after being thrown over a bridge by a group of U.S. soldiers. It's telling that his death is the result of disdain and carelessness rather than outright violence, since one of the movie's implicit points is that the Americans deciding how to run Iraq have little or no contact with the people they're supposedly trying to emancipate. (When I asked Deborah Scranton, whose documentary The War Tapes was shot by National Guardsmen on Iraq, why that movie had so little footage of soldiers interacting with Iraqis in nonconfrontational situations, she said it was because their orders forbade it.) A Baathist diplomat brought into the Green Zone to advise American forces is cut short by a bow-tied neocon, who advises him, "I have a master's in Oriental studies." The Iraqi purrs back, "Is this the Orient?" Where's Edward Saïd when you need him?

Like the drowning death that sparks Chinatown, the Iraqi boy is just a way into a much larger story. (The debt to the ultra-cynical noir is made explicit when Dan tries to calm Anna's outrage over the military cover-up. "It's Iraq," he says.) While that thankfully spares us the spectacle of casting Nielsen as the morally upright white woman crusading for justice on the dead Iraqi's behalf, it also leaves The Situation without a center, an appropriate but still glaring fault. A ginned-up love triangle only makes matters worse.

The movie isn't sentimental enough to make us care whether Anna ends up with her on-again, off-again boyfriend Dan, or whether her obvious attraction to Zaid will be reciprocated. (That Steavenson is herself engaged to an Arab photojournalist unfortunately tells you all you need to know about how the characters are portrayed.) The problem is that Anna, in conception and especially in execution, is a glyph, a walking ball of concern and half-understanding. Blond locks flowing from under her carefully knotted head scarf, she's a wisp of an idea rather than a full-blooded character. Zaid isn't much better, a wan, noble sort who really only exists in relation to the American characters.

Lewis, an energetic Englishman who specializes in playing off-balance Americans (he was the lead in Lodge Kerrigan's Keane), gives more presence to his embattled intelligence agent, a cynical realist surrounded by ideologues. Steavenson writes in free-flowing monologues that are often deadly to the movie's never particularly robust momentum, but Lewis reads them as if he's on a treadmill, particularly a thematically rich but dramatically dead tirade directed at a new recruit bent on applying the party line regardless of its relationship to the reality on the ground. "There are no bad guys and there are no good guys," he spiels. "It's not gray, either. It's just that the truth shifts according to each person you talk to."

Dan's speech is a withering rebuke to the blinkered Bushies who plunged the country into a vicious and probably irreversible chaos by insisting that if they simply pursued the same course long enough, all parties would see the rightness of it. But it's not enough to replace ideological certitude with sophomoric relativism. This tells us that Iraq is fucked and we have helped make it so. But at this point, it's attacking a view that no longer exists, at least among people who might be even slightly convinced by watching it. It's one thing to paint an imaginary world as irretrievably rotten; quite another when millions of lives are at stake. We can't forget it. It's not Chinatown.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

The Situation, Directed by Philip Haas, A Shadow Distribution release