|
Review:
In the Jan. 2002
issue of Premiere, The Movie Magazine,
Josh Harnett is quoted as follows:
“We
[Americans] have a real problem of being ignorant on a lot of world politics,
being so self-contained. But I think we need to pay attention to what is
happening in the rest of the world, because, obviously, a lot of people are
unhappy with us.”
Indeed. And now we know that the Clinton Administration’s
stumble on a humanitarian aid mission to Mogadishu, Somalia in October 1993,
with the deaths of 19 American soldiers, and many more wounded, with one
soldier kidnapped, has historical significance beyond anything most of
appreciated at the time. Indeed, the militias that descended upon the troops
trying to take out one warlord interfering with food shipments (already
300000 Somalis had died of a famine) had been trained by Al Qaeda, by a
network already with deep ties to Osama bin Laden.
The film, shot on location in Sidi Moussa, Morocco
(and looking like Mogadishu) is
perhaps the most graphic war “flick” ever made. Never has so much bodily
mayhem been shown without a sense of gratuitousness. At one point, a solider
is shown still alive (only momentarily) with the whole bottom half of his
body, below the diaphragm, missing, as in Starship
Troopers or even Pieces. At
another point there is makeshift major surgery on the battlefield by Sgt. Eversmann (Hartnett) and a buddy trying to stop a soldier
from dying of internal bleeding. The movie has 100 minutes straight of
non-stop battlefield footage.
Near the end, there is a question “why do we fight in
other people’s civil wars,” when Eversmann says it
isn’t just to be a hero. It seems to be for the bonding. This incident
occurred a few months after the country had publicly debated gays in the
military, and made much of the unit cohesion problem. Indeed, the atmosphere
is monosexual, all male, and there is hardly any
better film documentation of the urgency of complete trust among members of a
military team in combat. Most of the time, the cohesion is tremendous and all
absorbing. But there is one sequence where a somewhat less selfless soldier,
complaining of deafness, starts “losing it” in ability to keep fighting. There is also the line at one point (early
on), “don’t ask.”
Even so, Eversmann’s character
(Josh Harnett) comes across as more “refined” and “civilized” than most of
the other men, at one point early in the film saying that he is here “to
accomplish something.” He seems to stand apart from the men he leads, almost
as if he were like the Clark character out of Smallville. Is
this the way this person really was, or is this how Hartnett comes across in
the context of his sudden stardom? I could not tell. And, we now know that
sometimes we have not choice but to fight, as outside interests (“civil
wars”) will not ignore us. But them, there is the libertarian argument that
if we minded our own business, everyone else would
leave us alone—not sure that I agree.
The film does not completely explain the historical and
political context of this incident. I think that there is an argument for a
style of filmmaking that can combine more historical episodes in one
film. This is common on cable series
but needs to be tried more in high-end feature films for theaters, Americans
still do not understand their history, how things
got to be the way they are.
On ABC “Good Morning
America” Capt. John Struecker (now a chaplain)
discussed the fact that warlords handed out amphetamines to the street
militia, and that Americans were surprised by the size and intense hatred of
the resistance. CNN and the History Channel have both prepared films on this
incident. The politics of the warlords was complicated but easily exploited
by those with future agendas of terrorism.
The distributor and film companies waited to the end to
display their trademarks. I missed seeing the Statue of Liberty and rising
scales of Columbia’s mark as the
movie opened.
The 1983 film Love Letter from Somalia, directed by Frederic Mitterand (nephew of the former French president), from
the point of view pf the memoirs of a gay man now in Paris separated from a
lover, documents the horrendous poverty in Somalia even beforew
the 1991 coup ousted pro-Soviet dictator Barre in
favor of today’s warlords (including Adid). The real low-rise and
adobe-looking Mogadishu comes
through with even more realism. They
don’t sell time-shares there; it is a horrible place.
Here is a good place to mention The
Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (2001),
from Traveling Light Films, written, produced and directed by John Gianvito, associate curator of the Harvard Film Archive,
168 Minutes, no rating (suggest a soft “R”).
This film documents the home front during and after the Persian Gulf
War (Desert Shield, Desert Storm), particularly through three characters in
the Santa Fe, N.M. area. Fernanda (Thia Gonzalez), a
Hispanic woman with an Egyptian husband, struggles with the disappearance and
apparently hate-oriented deaths of her children from anti-Arab sentiment
(note her last name); Carlos (Robert Perrea)
returns from the war and is unable to find work, and in one orgy scene “in
the bedroom” with two females, shows off a war-related skin rash on his thigh
in a scene that is certainly disturbing rather than erotic in its
explicitness. Later he will commit an on-camera rape. Finally, teenager
Raphael (Dustin Scott) falls out from his conservative parents as he joins
the peace movement. In one scene, his father tongue-lashes his high school
teacher for putting ideas into the boy’s head. Later, in an argument, the
father says that his son’s outspokenness about his beliefs won’t make any
difference: the war issue is already settled in a democratic way and the
politicians will do their wills.
Raphael drops out, into panhandling and drugs, but cleans up his act
and becomes a model young man with the therapeutic help of an elderly woman
who listens to him—and by the end he has become convincing as a peace
activist once he has become clean cut, gone back to school and started
earning his own way. The movie does
take advantage of plenty of chances to preach—and it doesn’t always examine
the “other side” (what would be the consequences if our country stayed out of
everything, as libertarians want?) If you, say, watch Norman Scharwzkopf’s archives on the History Channel you get a
balanced perspective. It is somewhat improvisatory,
with snippets of footage of the Gulf War (from the Jan. 17, 1991 opening
bombings on Baghdad to the Highway of Death from Kuwait into Basra), to the playings of the “our” guitar by an Iraqi (in memory of
those wounded in the earlier Iran-Iraq war), to the “welcome home” parties
for our troops in June 1991 (I attended the party at the Washington
Monument), to the May Day party at the end.
Hotel
Rwanda (United Artists/Lions Gate, 2004, dir.
Terry George, 110 min, PG-13) is a large independent film shot in South
Africa and actually on location in Kigali, Rwanda, in CinemaScope—a
tremendous opportunity for the moviegoer.
This is a film that recalls The Killing Fields, and even The Year of Living
Dangerously—all it needs is Linda Hunt. The massacre in 1994 of the Tutsi
tribe by the Hutu tribe is a genocide that exceeds Bosnia,
perhaps even Cambodia.
The Clinton administration was
already caught up in the embarrassment over Somalia,
and European countries were thoroughly embarrassed by the heritage of their
mercantilist colonial politics in Africa. The French,
in fact, had supplied the Hutu with arms. Now Paul Rusesabagina
(Don Cheadle) is a very conscientious,
customer-service-oriented hotel manager, who painfully organizes the escape
of his family and many of his guests. Nick Nolte provides a retrospect of his
earlier career as a reluctant UN peacekeeper. In one critical scene, Paul
urges his guests to “shame” their personal contacts into intervening internationally
to save them when the European and American governments can’t. This sounds
like a libertarian triumph, when government doesn’t work.
The early part of the film builds up the tension leading
to violence (with the signal line “Cut the tall trees!”), and provides some
good information on how the Rwanda
situation developed. Apparently the Belgians in the 19th Century
divided the tribes according to arbitrary characteristics. Paul will do
anything—buy future favors from corrupt people in high places—to save his
family, as he must when he bribes rebels to keep his family and others from
being executed summarily. In one bedroom scene he tells his wife, “Family is
all that matters.” How many people live out their lives this way—family is
what they have to live for, nothing else, as they have no personal freedom to
challenge “the system.” Hence, loyalty to blood becomes the measure of a man.
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire (2004, California
Newsreel/White Pine/CBC, dir. Peter Raymont, based on the book by Romeo Dallaire)
is a documentary about a former Canadian Lt. General who led a UN
peacekeeping attempt in Rwanda starting in early 1994. The film starts with
an optimistic note, with the green scenery around Lake Victoria
as he files into Rwanda.
Quickly the situation becomes desperate. The Hutu government is determined to
exterminate the Tutsi, and soon the roads are covered with rotting corpses.
The UN, his own government, European countries and the Clinton Administration
all fail to take his flight seriously, and soon 800000 Rwandans are dead. The
Belgians, as noted, had created the problem (in anticipation of Nazi-like
mentality later) and the French had exacerbated it by egging on the Hutu
government. Ten years later, Dallaire visits. We
see glimpses of modern luxury hotels even in a country like Rwanda,
but we also see the blue stadium that held 12000 refugees living and dying in
squalor. The “devil” becomes that flaw in human nature, sometimes discussed
by the Pope in sermons, that can lead to
exterminations of those who are different.
The Last
King of Scotland (2006, Fox Searchlight/FilmFour/DNA
Films, dir. Kevin MacDonald, novel by Giles Foden,
119 min, R [very close to NC-17 in one or two scenes], UK) When I lived in New York in the 1970s, a
close friend in the Village sometimes talked about Idi
Amin Dada and accurately characterized him as a
“butcher.” (The other dictator as personally brutal seems to have been Pol Pot, “The Killing Fields.”) Forest Whitaker here puts
on a riveting performance of psychopathic dictator who is always reversing
and contradicting himself. The opposite pole is the young Scottish doctor
Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy)
who, often enough in his skivvies (open-necked to shirtless, of course) in
swimming pool or bedroom scenes, looks like a skinny graduating high school
teen (McAvoy was actually about 27 when this film
was made) but has this overwhelming charismatic and warm personality that
takes in Amin and then gets the young doctor, ironically,
into peril for his own life. He is the sort of person that would have become
a runaway game Jeopardy champion today, perhaps. Early on, he spins a globe
and agrees with himself to go wherever his finger points, on some kind of
idealistic mission, to bring medicine to the poor. It’s about 1971. (This is
the “Beyond Borders” syndrome but here the doctor is even more affable.) He
winds up in Uganda
and is taken in as Amin’s personal physician, which
soon becomes a political confidant as well. (For example, the doctor has to
deal with Amin’s expulsion of Asians.) Amin simply does not realize that his young friend will
be revolted by his ruthless politics as he finds out, and then carry on a
masquerade in order to escape. Quickly, Amin
demonstrates what seems like a homoerotic interest in the young male doctor,
as in one scene where follows and he stares while Garrigan
changes clothes, totally nude for a fleeting moment. The film will gradually,
if partially, confirm these suspicions, even as Amin
arranges a party and seems to set up his own wife to get knocked up by the
young doctor, whom Amin is said to refer to as his "white monkey."
(Not exactly one of the "twelve monkeys." Amin also likes to watch
porn videos like "Deep Throat.") It’s all fun for him, but then it
isn’t—the psychopathology again. There will be a scramble, and an attempt to
arrange an abortion, but then the Entebbe
hijacking hostage crisis occurs (it’s now 1976, and Garrigan
never looks a day older.) Garrigan will captured
and tortured in a homoerotic scene reminiscent of “Midnight Express”; his
shirt is torn open, and knives and pecs hooks are
applied to his chest as he is “hung.” (Of course, the same kind of thing has
happened to Clark Kent a couple of times in the Smallville
series.) Miraculously, one of Amin’s aides is
willing to rescue him and send him along with the hostages, possibly out of
the same sort of potential “romantic” attachment. Whitaker could get the best actor Oscar
this year, and McAvoy the best supporting actor.
Blood
Diamond (2006, Warner Bros./Virtual
Studio, dir. Edward Zwick, story by Edward Leavitt,
138 min, R, UK) has (like The Departed) Leonardo Di
Caprio as a fully grown man, even to the point of
un peu scraggly chest hair, and a blond descendent
(the character named Danny Archer) of apartheid, actually a self-made
mercenary and diamond smuggler after he was orphaned at nine in Zimbabwe. Di Caprio speaks with a South
African accent, and still seems like a good guy, like maybe he could have
been a CIA agent. In Sierra
Leone, where rebels rule and exploit the
“conflict diamond” trade, they need G-men. And there are plenty of corrupt
American (or are they Belgian) military in the film. Sebastian Junger had done riveting reports on Sierra
Leone in 1999, and in the film the
journalist is female Maddy Bowen (Jennifer
Connolly). Djimon Honsou
plays Solomon Vandy, the third corner of the
character triangle, a fisherman sent to labor in the mines by the rebels. He
finds a huge pink diamond and hides it (after a harrowing Auschwitz-like
scene where other prisoners and even the kids are hacked to pieces, almost on
camera). In jail (Archer can’t stay out of jail all the time) Danny hears
about this, and then tracks down Solomon. If he can get the diamond and get
out of the country, he can help Solomon save his family. They meet up with Maddy, who wants a good story and whose charms get them
out of trouble. On the run (the movie seems to become a bit like Apocalypto,
opening the same day), they clash, until at one point, in a stunning scene
visually, Solomon asks Danny about having a wife and children and whether
Danny ever will. Danny is not sure, and in fact never takes advantage of
female companionship. (Are we to imagine that Danny Archer is gay? If so,
it’s interesting to see his military and sniping skills on display all the
time. He seems to be very fit, despite the depressing and annoying chain
smoking.) Interesting. He would rather be a self-made man who changes his
world in his own way, and at that level we accept the character. (I think
Josh Hartnett could have played the role and would have given a similar
effect.) We leave Danny, with a collapsing lung after a firefight, on a
mountaintop where he calls the reporter in Capetown.
We will not be reassured about Danny’s fate despite the fact that we like
him. There will be a big secret handoff to Tony Blair in London
(which becomes Maddy’s final scoop), and Stephen
Collins (7th Heaven) plays the ambassador. Most of the film was
shot on location in Mozambique,
in Cinemascope, and in DLP the clarity and
depth of the photography is stunning.
You can read the diamond
industry’s account of the political problems at http://www.diamondfacts.org and the
interview with Zwick here.
The diamond industry’s website discusses the Kimberley Process and claims
that 98% of all commercial diamonds are “conflict free.” (That is, conflict
diamonds come from rebel groups like RUF.) Much of the smuggling problems in
the past involved the Ivory Coast and Liberia, a country known for many
things (such as the Liberian ship registry; an insurance company that I
worked for in the 90s actually owned such a registry process for a while and
would promote executives into it.) New York City
is well known for its midtown diamond district (the subject of the novel and
film “Marathon Man”) and as
recently as the 1970s was very anti-gay; I knew a bartender the West
Village who claimed he had been
fired for being gay covertly.
There is a book by Greg Campbell, Blood Diamonds from Westview
Press, 2004. Mr. Campbell was interviewed on CNN over the 12/10/2006 weekend.
Since this film aims at consumer
awareness, it bears comparison to the video documentary Black Gold, about the coffee
business. But this is a very large film. I wonder if Participant could have
made this film.
|