Word: soldier
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...mean, you saw a bit of it in Platoon. Not on this scale. But that's part of what the movie shows, visualizes, dramatizes - the peer pressure, the tension. [My Lai] happened. It's a fact. It's history. I'm not seeking to denigrate the average soldier. There was a breakdown in that division and there was a breakdown from the top. And I think it had a lot to do with the war policy, which was basically body counts, kill ratios, search and destroy, free-fire zones - these concepts, when they are allowed to grow, grow...
...Petraeus and Crocker have been the best soldier and the best diplomat to serve the U.S. in Iraq. But they see the situation from different perspectives, and their ideas about what to do next may differ as well. The Petraeus testimony seems obvious. He will emphasize the Sunni success, the tamping down of violence in Baghdad, the need for political reconciliation. He will ask for more time, acknowledging that the natural rotation schedule will leave him with fewer troops, a reduction from 20 to 15 combat brigades over the next year. Bush may try to hold his Republicans in place...
...Salazar, who hopes his video record will get him into film school, is the movie's recording Angel; he tells one of his squad subjects, "The camera never lies." That's nonsense, the other soldier says, "The camera does nothing but lie." De Palma has been investigating the question of visual veracity for most of his 40-year career. Redacted takes him back, back, past the Hitchcock homages and the action epics, back to his earliest films: Greetings! and Hi, Mom!, two innovative satires on the Vietnam War. The first film has clips of Lyndon Johnson addressing the nation...
...Hank Deerfield (Jones) is a terse, honorable man, an ex-soldier who, against the pleas of his wife (Sarandon), encouraged his son to enlist for Iraq. Now he learns that the boy, Mike, has been back in the States without telling his family and, much worse, has been found murdered. Was the crime drug-related? Hank is skeptical. He tells an Army doctor, "You know, the Army does regular drug tests on its soldiers." The doctor replies: "Not when they're in Iraq...
...well played by Jones, Theron and Sarandon, have nuances worth noting; and even the ones capable of committing the most heinous crimes seem like decent people to whom some awful thing happened. (Special mention to Wes Chatham, who could be Matt Damon's younger, cuter brother, as a soldier testifying to Hank about the killing.) The combination of dedicated actors and a superior script helps make Elah a far more satisfying film than Crash...