Late into Green Zone, Paul Greengrass's gratifying if slightly garbled Hollywood treatment of the first months of the Iraq war, George Bush makes his inevitable appearance, in a clip pulled from the "Mission Accomplished" debacle. The only actual player to appear in a film filled with coy doppelgangers, Bush's visage caused a strange response to roll through the audience -- not boos or hisses but a low, mortified, neck-rolling groan. It was the kind of reaction provoked, perhaps, by the far away memory of an ill-advised seafood buffet: major buzz-kill.
Has enough time passed, already, that derision for Bush has dulled to a foggy murmur of disapproval? Has enough time passed, finally, for the horrific fraudulence of the Iraq war to be satisfyingly dramatized on screen? Relying both on the public's failing memory and the potentially galvanizing effect of horning true events into familiar genre constraints, Greengrass walks the line connecting those two questions with unusually savvy political and directorial instincts. The result is a film whose narrative impact is matched (and then, somewhat unfortunately, outpaced) by its stylistic and entertainment imperatives.
"The intel isn't right," says U.S. warrant officer Miller (Matt Damon), after completing the third raid of a reported Baghdad WMD site, one month into the war, that has turned up nothing but toilet parts and pigeon shit. It's a statement he repeats at least half a dozen times in the film's first 15 minutes, and it's all you really need to know about The Green Zone's record-straightening agenda. Miller's stubborn objections draw the attention of the Pentagon (in the supercilious form of Greg Kinnear), the CIA (a grizzled operative played by Brendan Gleeson), and the press (a Wall Street Journal reporter played by Amy Ryan). Within this quadrangle of protocol, puppetry, and independent prerogative, Greengrass sets up an investigation of the war's genesis and the botch that led to the disastrous insurgency.
But don't get too hung up on all that: what's really on offer is a bloody good ride. Having set up the successful Bourne franchise with Damon, Greengrass here seems determined to take their act on the road, perhaps put it in service of more substantive material. The result can be disorienting and occasionally specious, but for the most part the effect is one of pure exhilaration. From the jolt of the opening raid to the churning war rooms and high caliber action, for viewers (perhaps I should say liberal viewers) it is fascinating to watch these events unfold clearly and coherently, and in the way Americans seem most willing and able to receive them: on screen and at a slight remove.
Damon is in full truth-seeking cipher mode: a comforting, authoritative presence, his Miller is the All-American Private Ryan all grown up and hella pissed. It seems in this new war one must betray the American government in order to serve the American -- and Iraqi -- people. Having filched a notebook containing the safehouse information for Saddam's old guard during an unauthorized raid, Miller bounds through devastated Baghdad (United 93 and The Hurt Locker cinematographer Barry Ackroyd channels Greengrass's signature hand-held, white-knuckle style), searching for WMDs and then a Ba'athist lynchpin the Pentagon is racing to assassinate.
Screenwriter Brian Helgeland (working from Rajiv Chandrasekaran's exposé, Imperial Life in the Emerald City) negotiates the knotty moral and logistical terrain with a measure of grace and restraint uncommon to the genre. The character of Miller's tipster and then translator Freddy (Khalid Abdalla) manages to transcend the ghetto of narrative devices and actually put a compelling face on the Iraqi people. Even the clear and potentially gratuitous references to Abu Ghraib, journalistic shilling ("When do you check the story?" Damon asks Ryan, leaving the "duh" unspoken), and Saddam's execution before international trial ("It is not for you to decide what happens here," says Freddy) land smoothly. Already sketchy allegiances shift with desperate frequency, and even Miller's intent loses focus several times: the concept of the truth is in murderous flux when Saddam's number two man comes across as something dangerously close to tragically misunderstood.
The penultimate sequence, a tour de force of hot pursuit, tests the limits of this kind of hybrid, in addition to completely beggaring this viewer's equilibrium (I saw several people rush for the doors). As it succumbs to an anonymous action set piece, the film's other hyper-generic constructs are set into relief: Miller, an avatar for a frustrated public, amounts to an empty, golden uniform; you might walk away from Green Zone convinced that Greg Kinnear singlehandedly perpetrated the Iraq war. Greengrass has embraced the risk inherent in turning a true, unpopular story into a mainstream entertainment, but as the film's ultimate false note of triumph confirms, he can't quite handle the responsibility.