Word: zoning
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Maybe Green Zone will be the breakthrough. Set in the first months of the U.S. occupation, the film has a churning urgency and a fierce verisimilitude, courtesy of director Paul Greengrass (United 93) and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (The Hurt Locker). Shot in Spain, Morocco and the U.K., the film straps you into a Baghdad state of mind. It's hell at 130°, with dust and dread tarping the streets as if to smother anyone who'd attempt to escape. Murderous intent abounds on both the U.S. and Saddam-loyalist sides; life is cheap, and the stakes are high...
...Green Zone also has Matt Damon, a real movie star, reteaming with Greengrass to essentially parachute their franchise's hero, Jason Bourne, into the toxic reality of Iraq. Like The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, this new collaboration rubs the nose of a fantasy plot into the gritty soil of political intrigue. Roy Miller, the Army chief warrant officer played by Damon, is a good soldier who realizes that his mission - to unearth the weapons of mass destruction the Bush Administration used as a rationale for invading Iraq - is bogus. Now, dammit, he'll find what's behind that...
Heart of Obfuscation Brian Helgeland's script is "inspired" by Rajiv Chandrasekaran's 2006 book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone. In it, the Washington Post reporter detailed the arrogance and naiveté of the young zealots the Bush Administration sent to pacify Iraq: how they frolicked beside Green Zone swimming pools as if Baghdad were spring-break Fort Lauderdale, handed out tens of millions in cash to American and Iraqi connivers and blithely mismanaged the occupation into chaos...
...movie alights on this tragicomedy, if only as background chatter. It's true: you'll have to sit through all the end credits to read that this is a work of fiction. But that it is should be obvious from the middle of Green Zone on, when Miller starts proving that only one good man is needed to corral war criminals of every stripe. He'll be Bourne plus Philip Marlowe plus Seymour Hersh - provided he makes it out alive. The movie, in other words, is made up; Chandrasekaran's book has as much to do with Green Zone...
Greengrass might say you have to twist the facts to tell the truth, and his film does get to the heart of obfuscation in the early occupation of Iraq. Besides, in movies, entertainment trumps ethics. Green Zone has a fullness of character, a density of detail, a cunning mystery plot and so much stuff blowing up that audiences might not realize they're seeing an Iraq-war film. They'll be too scared stiff enjoying themselves...