FILM REVIEW
Iraq's heart of darkness Redacted by
writer-directorBrian De Palma
Reviewed by Dan Geist
NEW YORK - Midland, a small city in the heart of the west Texas oil country, is
proud to be known as the childhood home of the US President and
Commander-in-Chief, George W Bush.
Brian De Palma's new movie Redacted is a fictional take on the overseas
exploits of another youthful resident of the city, one whose Midland days are
not touted by the local Chamber of
Commerce. The real-life character whose deeds inspired the film is Steven Dale
Green.
Like his famous president, Green fell early and even harder for the charms of
the spirit bottle. Still shy of his 20th birthday, he had already racked up a
record of alcohol and drug abuse that included three misdemeanor convictions.
Meanwhile, two years after Bush had declared a United States victory in its
latest war, the US Army was experiencing a severe recruitment shortfall. More
liberal, embracing attitudes naturally gained sway in the hiring office.
So it was that newly anointed Private First Class Green arrived in another
oil-rich territory, Iraq, in the autumn of 2005. There, if the accounts of his
fellow soldiers are to be credited, this younger son of Midland left his own
mark on history.
Green is alleged to be the primary instigator of the Mahmudiyah atrocity, a
slightly altered version of which forms the centerpiece of Redacted. One
afternoon in March 2006, a group of US soldiers based in that suburb of
Baghdad, well lubricated by whisky-and-energy-drink cocktails, stormed the home
of 14-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi. As two soldiers took turns raping
the girl, her parents and five-year-old sister were shot dead in another room,
allegedly by Green.
According to the testimony of the other soldiers involved, Green proceeded to
rape Abeer and kill her. One of his associates then poured kerosene on her
body, which was set ablaze. Following a tip from another man in their unit,
four soldiers were arrested for their roles in the crime and a fifth for
failing to report it. Green was discharged from the Army on psychiatric grounds
before his participation came to light.
The two men who first raped Abeer - Sergeant Paul Cortez and Specialist James
Barker - ultimately confessed and are now serving prison sentences that will
last a minimum of 10 and 20 years, respectively, perhaps much longer. Their
roles are merged in one Redacted character, B B Rush.
Green himself awaits trial in federal court, facing the death penalty. His
cinematic version is named Reno Flake.
De Palma has made a powerful antiwar film - one that mentions the names of
neither Bush nor any of those other policymakers who sang the virtues and
ineluctable success of the 2003 invasion. Though a colonel makes a brief
appearance to blackly humorous effect, Redacted focuses almost entirely
on the lower pay grades - those in the noncommissioned ranks who do most of the
killing and dying on the US side of the conflict.
Redacted successfully conveys how the nature of the war and the US part
in it casts the soldiers on the ground into an impossible position.
Excruciating boredom is routinely interrupted by situations in which moral
compromise and psychological trauma are virtually unavoidable. The insight we
are given into how basically decent men could have been driven to keep silent
about a horror deliberately committed by their comrades, or even witnessed it
and failed to intervene, is strong.
De Palma has said that one of his central objectives was to have the "audience
experience what would make a bunch of regular guys do something so crazy". In
this he falls short, because the two central agents of the Redacted version
of the atrocity are far from regular guys.
In the first act of onscreen violence, Flake - in perfect accord with military
policy - fires into an Iraqi automobile that has crossed the "trigger line" of
the roadway checkpoint manned by his squad. Asked later if he feels any remorse
over killing the innocent pregnant woman inside, he makes an exaggerated show
of callousness that may be read as a desperate attempt to conceal true grief.
The meaning of the scene is altered and its power annulled as we discover that
Flake sincerely values nothing and is the chief villain of the tale.
It is a fact that Green has owned up to a similar, real killing (though of an
Iraqi man), and Flake's act of dismissal includes lines reproduced almost
verbatim from an interview Green gave to a military reporter. A deeper tragedy,
however, is lost. Much better men than Green continue to be obliged to commit
fundamentally identical acts, as policy, as fear, even as circumstantial
prudence, dictate. How much stronger the film would have been if one of the
more regular guys in the unit had been guarding the trigger line and performed
his duty. Here the capacity of fiction to get at a greater truth has been
squandered.
While the realization that Flake is a total head case drains him of interest,
suitable provocation would have been re-won if we learned that the Army knew he
was having job-related issues of unusual severity, just like his real-life
prototype. In December 2005, Pfc Green was officially diagnosed with "homicidal
ideations". The treatment plan consisted of a few doses of a mood regulator,
Seroquel, and the instruction to get some sleep.
Green was returned to duty in one of the most violent arenas of the conflict,
the so-called Triangle of Death where Mahmudiyah lies. No follow-up exam was
scheduled. Despite his treatment plan, in January 2006 Green found time to
express his hatred for all Iraqis to his battalion commander.
Both Flake and Rush are identified as "Dixie" boys (the soldiers on whom Rush
is based are actually from California). Cheap evocations of the "cracker"
stereotype grease the rails for the characters' foul turn a bit too slick, as
does Rush's boisterous pleasure in his own depravity. We know in the real world
that Barker wept in court as he explained that to live in Iraq, "to survive
there, I became angry and mean". It is impossible to imagine Rush shedding a
tear over anything beside an empty fifth of bourbon.
In the end, De Palma's allegiance to standard styles of villainy does his
largely masterful film a disservice. Where Flake reflects his real-life model
to a fault, the composite Rush is a pointless invention. His character is
obvious and trite: he was born to be big, loud, angry, and mean. His real-life
counterparts - Barker and Cortez - tell a more poignant, more enlightening, and
much more discomfiting story about war's toll on the souls of men.
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