Devil's double

B

Feebly-linked sequence of cliched scenes for Dominic Cooper's dual role as Saddam son and his double.

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Michael Thomas wrote a few screenplays based on novels or reality in the 1980s, including Scandal (the fact-based tale of a UK politician, prostitutes and Russian spies). In the 1990s, Thomas's Backbeat dramatised the fate of an original Beatle. His latest effort (2011) created a docudrama from the characters of Uday Hussein, Saddam's sadistic oldest son, and the Iraqi lieutenant lookalike (and former classmate) who was compelled to act as The Devil's Double.

The unlucky doppelganger, Latif Yahia, survived to write novels about his dangerous life inside the gilded, debauched, evil palaces of Iraq's "Black Prince". Inevitably, given the man's collaboration on the screenplay (and an uncredited bit part), he's depicted as a moderate moralist who saved his family's lives by taking Uday's place in public and in dangerous situations. The screenplay also shows Saddam and one of his doubles at work but doesn't explain why the dictator's younger son, Qusay, didn't play the same game.

The key factor for such a movie plot is the actor playing the superficially identical characters, and Dominic Cooper fills the two pairs of shoes attractively. This could have been the breakthrough movie for the young English actor, after various good supporting roles recently (An Education, Captain America, Brief Interviews), but Thomas and/or his producers (Europeans) opted not for a subtle psycho-political character study but for the R-rated Caligula/Scarface type of bio-drama, including rapes, beatings, cocaine snorts, wild gunfire and a dis-embowelling.

They gave the directing job to a known talent, New Zealander Lee (Die Another Day, Next, Along Came a Spider) Tamahori (who'd only worked on action-adventures after the failure of Mulholland Falls in 1996 and the lost promise of his 1994 multi-award-winning Once Were Warriors). Maybe the screenplay he had to work with already included poor-quality newsreel clips from Iraq's wars with Iran, Kuwait and the US, as well as its feebly-linked sequence of visually and verbally cliched scenes.

The overall tone is patronising and semi-racist. All characters speak English with bad accents, which demeans them, a la Arab stooges for Indiana Jones etc (except, remarkably, on account of his actor's facial firmness, Saddam). Cooper's two loads of changing accents are interchangeable, whether he's camply maniacal Uday or primly outraged Latif.

Uday's henchmen are heavy-smoking slouching mafiosi, the female interest who deserts Uday for Latif is an undesirably deadpan actress, and Latif's mournful court mentor and indiscreetly gay social organiser are dramatic contrivances with no dramatic purposes.

There possibly was an interesting story to be woven from the life and times of Uday/Latif. Let's hope the screenplay/s that will docu-dramatise Gaddafi's heir apparent will be a better vehicle for another deserving actor.

Whistleblower

A debut feature wins major awards at the Seattle and Whistler film festivals. It's a docudrama thriller re-telling post-civil-war Bosnian scandals (child-sex slavery and human trafficking). They were connected to a U.S. military contractor (Dyncorp), covered up by the U.N. and revealed by a Nebraska policewoman working for the U.N. as a highly-paid contract peacekeeping monitor. She's The Whistleblower, who went to the U.K. courts to seek justice for wrongful dismissal, and won her case. You can safely bet that, even if such a film was made by Angelina Jolie, it wouldn't get made by any commercially-minded American company.

Instead, it's a Canadian-German production, written and directed by Toronto-born Larysa Kondracki, mostly filmed on location in Romania. Remarkably, it attracted top acting talents for walk-on cameo parts. The Brit contingent included Vanessa Redgrave and Benedict Cumberbatch; Italy's Monica Belluci, Denmark's Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Californian David Strathairnalso appear.

Rachel Weisz is convincing as the real-life heroine, Kathryn Bolkovac, an increasingly angry professional disgusted not just by the Bosnian realities of racism, religious bigotry, sexism and callous brutality, but also by the tainted multi-billion-dollar business of international aid, corporate fraud and dishonesty, and international diplomatic connivance. As with Erin Brockavich, the twice-divorced whistleblower's personal failings are noted, but unfortunately for this woman's fight, the direction doesn't have a similar cinematic panache. It reports the horrors of the trafficking trade, but shies away from the necessary melodramatics that would better explain the policewoman's angst and anger.

This is a competent TV movie, akin to the European Storm production starring Kerry Fox as another real-life female campaigner. Worthy, but inappropriately flat.

Route Irish

Movies on DVD have to overwhelm their viewers, compel them to sit like an obedient dog, panting, unwilling to let their gaze wander. Route Irish did that with an intensely intriguing 10-minute first "act" showing a man of Irish-accented mystery in Liverpool coping with the bombing death of his best friend in Iraq. Then, mercifully it feels, director Ken Loach and his regular screenwriting associate, Paul Laverty, give their audience a breather, cutting to a crowded pub setting.

Unfortunately it's a cut not to the quick but the cliched, in yet another of the creative pair's polemical docudramatics. Their very unlikeable foul-mouthed anti-hero (Mark Womack) is a retired soldier who became a mercenary "contractor" in Iraq and invited his best childhood friend to join him there. The pal sees a manic colleague shoot up a taxi, killing a family of four and a couple of kids, and then the pal and his team members die when an IED explodes on "Route Irish", the dangerous road linking Baghdad's Green Zone and airport. The anti-hero and his pal's widow join vengeful forces (and unhappy bodies) to find truth and justice.

Loach, who's retained his socialist beliefs during more than four decades of movie-making, hired other favourite veteran talents including cameraman Chris Menges and composer George Fenton. As usual, the Loach-Laverty team employed little-known local actors to add the required air of cine-reality (and consequent amateur theatricals) and wove archive newsreel and emotional dialogue to illustrate blood-thirstiness by Allied forces and insurgents alike. There are some striking camera shots, telling narrative moments and effective editing, but the overall effect is yawnfully uninvolving. The promise of the initial setting evaporates.

Armadillo

Anyone who watches Restropo, the documentary chronicling the lives and work of US troops stuck in an Afghan outpost, needs to give themselves a double-feature DVD session, also viewing its contemporary Danish equivalent, Armadillo.

Both movies, composed of embedded cameramen's recordings, took the name of their unit's home base. Both focused on the grunts, not the generals. And each ended up confirming the obvious question: what are professional Western soldiers doing in the unwelcoming countryside of impoverished, undeveloped Afghanistan?

Each also helps to explain why soldiers stay with their chosen profession, and choose in many cases to accept re-postings to military arenas. Their daily lives in their bases are tedious; only in action and facing the threat of death do they find the "adventure", camaraderie and purpose they signed up for.

The Danish documentary crew landed up in a much more adventurous situation than Restropo's. Armadillo lay closer to Taliban guerrillas, under frequent attack in the small area of Helmand province they patrolled. The cameras capture a sweeping panorama of military life, including the mundane (cleaning weaponry), the hierarchical (briefings) and the deadly (close combat in farmland).

No commentary is needed: the passing time in the young men's 6-month tour of duty (their first in Afghanistan) is captioned, from their home farewells (the injured platoon commander temporarily returning to Copenhagen for surgery and rehab). Usage of telecoms messages, drone viewpoints and off-duty asides depicts the soldiers' harsh reality of invisible foes and crippling IEDs. One mesmerising battle scene is a war journalist's unwanted masterpiece: a soldier, shot in the shoulder during an action, his face and eyes a study in shock and dread.

The debut feature-length work from director Janus Metz Pedersen employed an experienced documentary cinematographer, editor, and composer of suitably modish mood music. The soundtrack of reality (gunfire, explosions, soldiers' curses and shouts, village noises) is striking (and confirms the audio-visual veracity of The Hurt Locker).

Most effectively, the film illustrates the futility of the occupying forces' efforts to win hearts and minds. They hand out snacks to the village children, and are subsequently hounded for goodies. They try to be friendly with village men, and are told they dare not cooperate. They bombard Taliban snipers and end up killing cows, ruining crops and destroying the homes of the villagers they supposedly defend. When they survive a skirmish and kill guerrillas, and a soldier later speaks unwisely to his mother on the phone, they are pilloried by the media.

What have their politicians got them into, and why? Movies made by embedded film-makers are no longer morale-boosting PR exercises; they are counter-productive, damning historical documents. When they are great cinema too, they are doubly admirable.

Kingdom, the

U.S. box-office takings provide interesting data for market analysis by knowledgeable analysts. They will know why the US$70-million military action-thriller The Kingdom, set in Saudi Arabia, grossed only US$45 million in theatres but amassed close to US$80 million in rentals.

Some may guess that it was the sort of movie appreciated by the sort of people who cannot afford to go to regular-priced cinemas.

Some will suspect an unusually good word of mouth, and it must be confessed that the movie is better than expected.

The action-adventure military-detective-procedural war movie covered a lot of ground in its dramatisation of real-life bombings on an American base in Saudi Arabia. It was one of newcomer Matt Carnahan's two screenplays to appear in 2007, when his star-studded (Cruise, Redford, Streep) Lions for Lambs also bombed at the box office (that Redford-directed political thriller, also focusing on the Middle East, grossed less than half of its US$35-million budget). The writer's good start in Hollywood (at the top, with some of the best) may have been helped by brother Joe Carnahan's track record (writing and directing Narc and Smokin' Aces).

Director Peter Berg had done well with his first feature in 1998, Very Bad Things, which he also wrote. The experienced movie actor subsequently directed an action adventure (The Rundown) and a sport epic (Friday Night Lights). The cast was strong too, headed by Jamie Foxx as the calmly forceful leader of a US army investigative team, assisted by a grizzly grunt (Chris Cooper), female forensics ace (Jennifer Garner) and foul-mouthed youngish character (Jason Bateman), enabling the producers to tick a bunch of demographic targets (blacks, middle-aged white blue-collar males, white wives and TV viewers). To attract discerning audiences, minor roles went to even stronger acting talents (Richard Jenkins, Jeremy Piven and Danny Huston).

Although filming was impossible in Saudi Arabia itself, location work in Arizona and Abu Dhabi provided convincing backdrops, as did a lot of ethnic Arab actors. The key one was Ashraf Barhom, a Galilee-born Arab-Israeli, engagingly credible as the American team's sympathetic liaison officer (leading to roles in Agora, Lebanon and Clash of the Titans). Another Arab-Israeli, Ali Suliman, was his assistant, a Morocco-born actor played an influential Saudi prince, and an Iraqi veteran actor portrayed lead plotter Abu Hamza. Even the stunts were fully professional, earning award nominations for their tricks of the multi-auto-crash trade.

Admirably, no sex scenes were squeezed into the plot. Melodramatics were limited to grieving family members and bonding soldiers. The editing, background music and sound effects helped to maintain a high level of edge-of-seatedness, and the screenplay didn't pander to anti-Muslim and/or anti-Arab post-9/11 audience prejudices. It acknowledged them, but incorporated an ironic set of opening and closing whispers designed to remind audiences that hatred and the desire for vengeance run two ways in a military campaign.

More astonishing, in terms of standard Hollywood gung-ho movies, the opening credits appeared over an outline history of the Saudi kingdom with relatively objective captions and images. Such an educational effort may have been wasted on many, but it's cheering to think that more than a handful of US renters (with pause buttons) may have paid closer attention than movie-goers could. One of the details that made The Kingdom seem way more worthy than expected.

Restropo

Restrepo, a fly-on-the-wall documentary feature observing US soldiers at work in Afghanistan during a 15-month tour of duty, has been long-listed for the documentary Oscar in 2011. The platoon was sent to the Korangal valley, a Taliban stronghold, to win hearts and minds.

Those key targets had not been gained by the previous platoon, as a platoon commander admits to a gathering of village elders (dozens of ancients with dyed beards and expressionless faces). The new platoon is trying hard but getting nowhere, and the movie indirectly shows why through such incidents as the uncompensated slaughter of a cow and the collateral damage suffered by a bombed hillside village.

Two photo-journalists, American Sebastian Junger and Englishman Tim Hetherington, were embedded with the platoon for a year in its small main base and the outpost the soldiers create on a nearby hilltop. It is called OP Restrepo in tribute to a medic killed soon after the platoon arrived in the lethal valley.

Nearly all of the time, the dozen or so soldiers (all men) in the small outpost sit, watch and wait. The platoon's mission is to help organise the building of a new road through the mountains, but the elders won't or can't provide labourers or support. Reports are phoned back to the base all the time, where a decision is made eventually that OP men will attack a dangerous Taliban position.

The documentary-makers (probably only one of them) join the hillside clamber, during which enemy fire kills a sergeant and injures other soldiers. Their assault clearly scares the young men at the time, and leaves them with distressed memories (stated in face-to-camera interviews back at a US army base in Italy). The bitter footnote, shown in an end-caption, is the fact that the US abandoned the outpost in April 2010, after the film was completed.

The making of the feature film must have had official approval, and the individuals on which the documentary focuses are notably above-average young grunts with pleasant dispositions and accents, and a minimal usage of four-letter words. They obviously accepted, and mostly ignored, the presence of non-combatant watchers: they joke, relax, stare into gun sights, smoke, sunbathe, eat (well), burn faeces and exercise, they do their job.

Restrepo is a very good, quietly respectful portrait of young men struggling, and it draws no simplistic anti-war, anti-occupation conclusions. Their moments of doubt regarding their mission are few. None of them are heard to wonder why Vanity Fair magazine commissioned the journalists, why the Pentagon approved (or proposed) their assignment, why their filming became a movie screened by the National Geographic channel, why they only spent a couple of days of their 15-month tour actually attacking the enemy.

Lebanon

Of all the wars fought by Israel, the ones that probably most damaged both the country's overseas image and its self-respect were waged in neighbouring Lebanon. Samuel Maoz was a young Israeli army recruit stuck in an invading tank in 1982, and his experiences led him to write and direct Lebanon. It won the Golden Lion at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, the Israeli film industry's first win there, and stirred up controversy and no film awards at home: its anti-war sentiment exposes the brutality and lies a country's leaders impose on their young soldiers.

Four novice army recruits are posted to a tank ordered to enter an air-bombed Lebanese village. One drives the "rhinoceros"; the gunner, loader and tank commander squeeze into the turret. Their only views of the outside world are through periscoped gun sights, which highlight their killing machine's purpose: the outside world is a landscape of targets inhabited by people who seem to be in an alien, impersonal world.

The tank, even more than the submarine in Das Boot, is a harsh, ugly military environment filled with the smells of fuel, urine, sweat and explosives. For a time, it also contains the corpse of an Israeli soldier the tank crew had caused to die. A professional commanding officer enters too, browbeating the scared, tired and dirty crewmen. They are instructed to fire illegal phosporus bombs in a clandestine way, and hold a Syrian POW inside the turret. Their nastiest outside visitor is a vicious Arabic-speaking Phalangist (Lebanese Catholic) who, unknown to the crew, puts the fear of Allah into the POW.

The gun sight shows bloodied corpses, maimed bodies, terrified children and women, eyes staring hatefully, buildings demolished. The reality of war, as the writer-director presents it, is never a matter of personal heroism or nationalist pride. It's shown as a living nightmare its participants have to learn how to live through, or die. The tank's dark and dingy setting, its claustrophobic atmosphere, the space restrictions and inevitable mechanical problems and personality conflicts do not glorify this type of mechanised warfare. It's condemned vividly, by a man whose first-hand experience and disgust can be sensed, almost smelt and felt, throughout the docudrama.

Green zone

They're back! Director Paul Greengrass and action star Matt Damon. A junior US army officer is the maverick truth-seeker in a world where his government lies. Is this the fourth installment of the Bourne franchise? No, it's Green Zone, the filmed version of the Washington Post's Baghdad correspondent's book about the USA's "Imperial" follies during its invasion and early occupation of Iraq in 2003.

Brian Helgeland, who'd also worked on Bourne scripts, wrote the docudrama's screenplay, and crafted a thing of joy for editor and co-producer Christopher Rouse to hop, skip and jump through (as he'd already done to award-winning effect for Greengrass's Bourne Ultimatum and United 93). Another United 93 colleague, Barry Ackroyd, was the cinematographer (and stayed in the same award-gaining setting for The Hurt Locker). Other talents rejoined forces; Greengrass has developed a crack production team for action-adventure features.

Movie buffs have a natural tendency to be conspiracy theorists, or that's one of my excuses for preferring plotlines that dramatise conspiracies. The alternative explanation for human madness, the cock-up theory, works well for comedies but not for action movies.

Damon's character is, of course, very incredible if one stops to think about the plot developments. That's why the Greengrass-Rouse combo is so crucial: there's no time to analyse their non-stop action. Would a warrant officer in charge of one unit looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Baghdad actually try and find out why all Intel's supposed WMD sites held nothing sinister? Would he choose to go off-task to follow an unknown limping Iraqi's tip-off? Would the local CIA chief take him on board? Would the US political regime let him keep one step ahead and try to singlehandedly get a deal with the leading Baathist general?

Did the Wall Street Journal actually publish a pack of official WMD lies? Well, yes, that one I can believe; I'm a devout conspiracy theorist.

The Arabic actor portraying the anti-Saddam limper has a tough job with the least credible character. He's too easily absorbed in the plot by Damon's CWO and too many US military personnel as an official translator, and his role in the film's conclusion is a very incredible foregone conclusion. Igal Naor has a more solid role as the Sunni general awaiting a call from the Americans. If his face looks familiar, you've probably seen his fine impersonation of Hussein in the British TV House of Saddam 4-part series.

The three key American occupation officials are well played cliches too, by Greg Kinnear (the standard sneering plotter, Brendan Gleeson (customary overweight world-weary CIA station chief) and Jason Isaacs (obligatory vicious hit man). The most telling, ironic lines of dialogue appear to be direct quotations from the US Imperial consul, Paul Bremer and George W himself.

The Bush regime told itself the lies it wanted to hear, the movie reveals. Did US movie audiences want to hear that truth? Only to the box-office value of $35 million. To be fair, as even conspiracy theorists must try to be, the lack of sexual antics and a Bourne-like heroic conclusion obviously didn't help.

Balibo

Every country has local stories that become major myths, fables in which there are no surviving witnesses to separate fact and fiction. In Balibo, an East Timorese village near the Indonesian border, five Australian journalists went missing, presumed killed, in 1975 during the invasion of the former Portuguese colony by Jakarta's military forces.

The 2009 docudrama chronicles their last few days in tandem with the story of the Australian foreign correspondent, Roger East, who followed their jungle tracks four weeks later. Based on a damning expose, the screenplay (co-written by playwright David Williamson) depicts East (Anthony Lapaglia) as a surprisingly emotional veteran who accepted an offer to head up the self-proclaimed independent republic's official news agency. The offer was made, in Darwin, by the new nation's young foreign minister (and eventual president) Jose Ramos-Horta, portrayed as a shrewdly pragmatic Che lookalike by Oscar Isaac (between other starring roles as Agora's Orestes and Robin Hood's King John).

In this version of the tragic fable, Horta gained East's acceptance by revealing the journalists' disappearance and then helping the paunchy middle-aged reporter investigate it. Soon after, when Indonesia fully invaded and occupied East Timor, the country's former independence fighters, Fretelin, sent Horta abroad to be their international spokesman (for 24 years). East stayed in the capital, Dili, and was killed, supposedly during an army round-up of civilians.

Director Robert Connolly builds tensions well in the two time frames. The quintet of TV newsmen, all in their mid-20s, are naively ambitious front-liners. A generation older, East is equally out if his depth. The youngsters sketch the Aussie flag on a wall, and East insistently cries out "I'm Australian" as if it were a mantra capable of lowering Indonesian rifles.

Connolly may have amplified geopolitical details in his commentary. I hope so, because there are only brief, though pointed, references to the secret support provided for Indonesia by both the USA and Australia. PM Whitlam, President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger are named, but the movie fails to explain why Jakarta and Washington, and Canberra, feared an independent East Timor.

All concerned, outside East Timor, were alarmed that its example might encourage other separatist movements in Indonesia. Neither does the movie explore the religious divide that had long created mutual antagonisms between the Catholic Portuguese colony and its Muslim neighbours on Timor island. Inevitably, there's no time either to note that the colony had two separate enclaves, or that neighbouring and divided Papua island was a very big political elephant in Australia's living room.

Fables, especially those about young men working in the media, have to be simple, and there is just one hint at the complexity of media competition in Australia that indirectly led to the journalists' deaths. They worked for two commercial channels; it's indicated that the national public broadcaster, ABC, pulled its news team out of Timor ahead of the expected invasion. Media nabob Packer is the only name named. The full stories of Balibo and Roger East (and Fretelin and Horta) will probably never be known. Funded by a slew of official Australian film commissions and produced with official East Timor government support, Balibo is the official fable. The dvd with a full package of background documentaries will be worth looking out for, if "History of East Timor and Balibo" etc contain information kept out of the docudrama feature.