Green Zone (2010)
Directed by Paul Greengrass
For those who like labels, Paul Greengrass could be just another director who likes to re-enact history, to be a little more precise, recent history, sometimes shortly after the media buzz on the subject is over. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that Greengrass is somehow the new Oliver Stone, even if his 9/11 movie, United 93, ran in theaters next to Stone’s 9/11 movie, World Trade Center, back in 2006. Nevertheless, it’s amazing how little the Hollywood experience changed his trademark, handheld camera style, preeminent already in his 2002 film, Bloody Sunday, even if the Bourne series made him change genres. With each movie, Greengrass didn’t betray his acclaimed breakthrough film. Quite the opposite: if back in the early 2000s there were just a few maverick directors who would dare to put the excitement of a fluid camera work into mainstream cinema (let’s say, Michael Mann, or even David O. Russell), it seems that Hollywood looks different since Greengrass arrived. Films like United 93 show how much his own style is ultimately indebted to the multiple talents of the British social realism of the 70s and 80s, concerning his visuals, his subjects and the fragile balance between objectivity and didacticism. For someone who saw Bloody Sunday, United 93 and his latest, Green Zone, it’s enough Peter Watkins in these films to make any argument futile. Any documentary filmmaker turned to feature films would cite also Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, but when it comes to actual exercises in propaganda for the just cause, as Green Zone undoubtedly is, Watkins is a better choice than Pontecorvo. But this also reveals Green Zone’s main weakness: lack of balance. Greengrass is eventually filmmaker who got his audiences used to hearing both sides of a story; in Bloody Sunday, both the British Army and the Irish insurgents had their share of inner conflicts and nuanced reactions; after all, they were all humans, both victims and aggressors. In Green Zone, this doesn’t seem to be the case, as the dialogues concern mostly the ones who have chosen the right side or seek the truth. Evil in Green Zone is mysterious, monolithic, without justifications. The investigations of the main character are intercrossed by images of Iraqi military forces in a meeting or U.S. military staff talking, but what the script lacks is the information that would make those negative characters verisimilar; they seem to have most of the time just a name and a face. Roy Miller (Matt Damon), the officer who is willing to find out more about the secret intelligence behind the rumors of WMD still being in Iraq, faces ultimately typologies: the corrupt official, the venal soldier. Excessively polarized between good and evil, Green Zone is the movie that left Michael Moore wondering how such a harsh statement against the American intervention in Iraq was produced by a major studio like Universal. That means at least one viewer had the feeling the actual events are depicted onscreen. Compared to previous efforts by the same director, though, the History depicted by Green Zone is told unfortunately from a single point of view, even if Greengrass surely had the capacity to deliver a more coherent and accurate flow of events.
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Some might argue it was necessary, for the sake of the genre. But which genre Green Zone belongs to, really? The only ones who seem to be pretty sure about the answer are the producers: it’s a Bourne-like thriller – the poster seems pretty sure that of a thriller, with Greengrass announced as the director of the previous (and profitable) The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, but not of United 93 and with a muscular Matt Damon promising an experience as intense as The Bourne Ultimatum (I cannot help but imagine a dizzy, disappointed viewer coming out of a theater, feeling all of a sudden a little better – “Well, at least it wasn’t as bad as Public Enemies!”). When it comes to Greengrass and Damon, they underline the opposite dimension of the film: its urgency, its pertinence as a history lesson mixed with a few elements meant to make it available to a wider audience. The problem is that, while Greengrass would expect a significative part of his Bourne audiences to take a step to the next level, the usual fans would feel that trey are already too versatile for witnessing this mixture made for blockbuster audiences. Either way, some of his regular viewers would probably just want to leave the audience once the action starts.
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Without his vain, harmful ambitions of putting together two types of viewers that usually don’t get along, Green Zone is an alert, well-crafted thriller. The only thing excessive is the focus on Matt Damon’s facial emotions; for a thriller, it’s just too much. Otherwise, you can hardly name a scene that’s pointless for the development of the plot, even if the ciné-vérité cinematography could imply at certain moments that we’re following a random path. There are no major digressions in the film, except minor incidents, witnessed by the characters. One of the American guardians of a prison is at some point watching an NBA game. Is it an anecdote? It’s very hard to believe, since the film is mainly about American blindness towards the Iraqi needs. But mainly this kind of incidents only get amplified along the story; in the very beginning, a soldier throws bottles of water to the locals; later, there is a riot, concerning the lack of water in the occupied Baghdad; finally, towards the middle of the film, the main character reaches an area where a huge, filled pool accommodates some of the high-ranking American officers. Besides themes that are resonated through the film, each scene features an important character or element of the story: in the very few seconds of the film, an Iraqi general picks up from a safe a notebook, a detail that could be easily missed, since the beginning of the film is quite chaotic; but the notebook turns out to be one of the main elements in the plot later. In this manner, each scene is precisely cut for its purpose in the development of the plot. This precise way of telling the story makes it very hard to imply that’s something missing from the film. Eventually, for understanding the story, it’s all there; what is missing is the sum of useless details and gestures that would make the “reality” Greengrass is trying to stress upon more convincing.
Surprisingly, the history lesson Greengrass is teaching turns out to be overall optimistic. The antidote for the conspirators, in Green Zone, is getting at the truth and revealing it, which, by the way, seems like an appropriate symbol for what Greengrass had in mind for this film in the first place: making an informed opinion available for a wide audience. Even if the combination between political skepticism and a taste for sensational, quasi paranoid plot makes Green Zone a weaker companion to Bloody Sunday or United 93, nevertheless, you can’t deny its actual courage, paradigmatic for the approach Greengrass has perfected
