Beyond The Multiplex, Salon, February 1, 2007

Beyond the Multiplex

by Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com, February 1, 2007

A compelling Iraq war thriller that will entertain and upset you.

“There’s no truth, you know,” a CIA official tells an idealistic young colleague in “The Situation,” the compelling new Iraq war thriller from veteran indie director Philip Haas. “There are no bad guys and there are no good guys. It’s not gray, either … There’s no truth! It’s lost in the fourth dimension of time.”

Those lines, and the extraordinary monologue by Dan Murphy (played by Damian Lewis) from which they come, express the ambiguity at the heart of “The Situation,” an uneven but impressively ambitious picture that depicts the contemporary Iraq conflict as an existential and moral heart of darkness. Made rapidly and on the cheap (in Morocco), and written by Wendell Steavenson, a journalist who has reported from Iraq, “The Situation” claims the prize of being the first American narrative feature to address the war directly. (Perhaps 20 percent of Irwin Winkler’s “Home of the Brave” is set in Iraq, but that film is principally about soldiers’ difficulties on coming home.)

Best known for his 1995 adaptation of A.S. Byatt’s “Angels & Insects,” Haas here imagines Iraq as the sun-bleached setting for an especially bleak film noir, in which love is treacherous, good intentions lead you-know-where and the line between good and evil is always shifting. For the first few minutes of “The Situation,” you may worry that you’re about to see a didactic fable about evil Americans oppressing virtuous Iraqis, but Haas and Steavenson’s scenario is nowhere near that simple.

It’s true that in the film’s opening scene some United States soldiers throw two Iraqi teenagers off a bridge, out of sheer cruelty and cussedness, but given what we now know about Abu Ghraib and the various reported civilian massacres, that doesn’t seem exceptional. Furthermore, there are Iraqis in the film, such as the shadowy local chieftain Sheik Tahsin (Saïd Amadis) and the ruthless insurgent leader Walid (Driss Roukh), who make the boorish, racist Americans look like Boy Scouts.

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Into this maelstrom comes Anna (Connie Nielsen), a blond, long-legged magazine reporter looking for the human stories beneath the deadening daily news broadcasts. (I don’t know how closely Wendell Steavenson resembles Nielsen, but despite the first name she too is a literary-minded female journalist.) Tangled in a romantic triangle between Dan, the CIA agent played by Lewis, and the handsome Iraqi photographer Zaid (Mido Hamada), Anna breezes through Iraq with noble intentions and a head scarf fashionably draped over her golden locks — and trails discord and jeopardy behind her, like the aroma of Chanel No. 5.

Sometimes Steavenson’s dialogue is a little clunky and expository, and a few of the supporting characters seem underdeveloped. But “The Situation” is a highly developed moral landscape, painted, as Dan suggests, in rapidly shifting colors rather than black, white or gray. No one is demonized: Not Dan, who genuinely believes he can use American money and power to rebuild a functioning Iraqi society, and not Walid, a former Republican Guard officer turned insurgent leader who wants approximately the same thing. It’s a land of chaos and murder, but none of it can be boiled down to good vs. evil; death, in this film’s Iraq, can come for a million reasons or none at all.

In a phone interview this week, Haas said he’s proudest of two things: He portrays numerous Arab characters as complicated, full-fledged human beings; and soldiers and others who’ve been in Iraq say he has captured the anarchic situation accurately. “If you look historically at films made about U.S. war abroad — and I guess I’m talking about Vietnam films — they were all made after the fact and they’re all about Americans,” he says. “Even in ‘Apocalypse Now,’ as great a film as that is, the Vietnamese are faceless. I wanted to do something that was immediate and that provided the Iraqi characters with some humanity.”

He recruited Arabic-speaking actors from all over the world, many of whom were grateful to play characters who weren’t terrorists or suicide bombers. Amadis, an Algerian-born actor who plays the Samarra power broker Sheik Tahsin, was seen in “Syriana,” while Omar Berdouni, who plays Anna’s translator, was one of the 9/11 hijackers in “United 93.” Mahmoud El Lozy, who has a terrific turn as a senior Baathist diplomat who feeds information to the occupying forces, is actually a theater professor at the American University in Cairo. (Apparently, Arabic speakers will notice that the spoken dialogue is in classical Arabic rather than the Iraqi dialect.)

“We’ve had a really positive response from soldiers who’ve seen the film,” Haas continues. “And even from conservatives who support the war. We showed it to a Navy SEAL officer one of my crew met on an airplane, and his view of that opening incident, when the soldiers throw those kids off the bridge, was, ‘You know, shit happens.’ This movie isn’t exactly about being pro-war or antiwar. The war is what it is. Frankly, I think if Bush saw the film and really thought about it, he’d say, ‘Yeah, it’s a crazy place.’ I mean, the occupation has been a disaster. It’s not like that proves that Iraqis are good and Americans are bad.”

To date, none of the documentaries made about Iraq have attracted much of an audience, although two of them — James Longley’s “Iraq in Fragments” and Laura Poitras’ “My Country, My Country” — have now won Oscar nominations. (Winkler’s “Home of the Brave” also vanished rapidly, despite a terrific performance from Samuel L. Jackson.) Early reviews of “The Situation” have been highly positive, and Haas is hopeful that his film can break through the apparent public distaste for this subject matter.

“With documentaries, as good as they may be, for a lot of people seeing them is like taking medicine,” he says. “I think this is an engaging story with challenging characters that will keep you watching. I hope this will entertain people, in its own grisly fashion. It’s an upsetting film, but, you know, so were ‘Taxi Driver’ and ‘Chinatown.’”

“The Situation” opens Feb. 2 at the Angelika Film Center and Lincoln Plaza in New York; Feb. 9 in Los Angeles and Washington; Feb. 16 in Stamford, Conn.; March 2 in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and San Luis Obispo, Calif.; and March 16 in Dallas, Houston and Santa Fe,. N.M., with more cities to follow.

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