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Unthinkable

Posted on August 29, 2010 by Paul

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Unthinkable is a ticking-bomb scenario writ large, a cinematic counter-argument of sorts to the unchecked jingoism of Fox’s 24. It begins with a dishevelled man addressing the camera. “My name is Yusef Muhammad, and I am an American citizen”. His voice is calm, resolute. The surprise of these scenes isn’t that they’re delivered from a plain room, unadorned with the usual stereotypes of Islamic terror, but that his name was once Stephen Younger. White, male; proud of his country.

He has three nuclear weapons with which to prove it.

At an FBI field office in Los Angeles, agents watch their TV screens as Younger’s face is plastered all over the news, pretty newscasters asking for the public’s help in tracking him down. The office scrambles to look through their files and find leads, but it soon becomes apparent that he has already been captured; that the alerts are going our retroactively. “Faces lead to places” remarks one of the officers, content that with Younger in custody all that remains is to track down the bombs.

When we think of terrorist suspects being subjected to rendition, we picture far-away places in Pakistan; a compound somewhere in the desert, far away from prying eyes. But Unthinkable presents a different scenario, one in which suspects like Younger are taken to abandoned bases firmly on US soil, yet which operate almost entirely outside of legal oversight. There is no Bill of Rights; the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply. Here, results are the objective, and the means are outsourced to so-called ‘outside contractors’.

Samuel L Jackson appears as a contractor known simply as ‘H’, in a role pleasingly lacking in the bombast and bravado of his recent films. He has a charming family, not at all separate from his work in the field; his wife brings him lunch, and in one quaint scene they even picnic together, yards from where his subject – Younger – is being brutally tortured. Perhaps, you think to yourself, this is how it works in places like this? Even concentration camp guards retired to the mess hall once in a while, stopping to wash their hands on the way.

Then there’s Agent Helen Brody. Honest and hard-working, she is – somewhat transparently – set up as the film’s white knight, standing in opposition to the casual abuses that pass as ‘operational procedure’ in field bases such as these. She accompanies H to the interrogation room, appalled to find Younger strung up to the ceiling, his chest being sprayed with ice cold water as the temperature in the room drops. “This is amateur hour,” H declares, taking off his jacket as though to signal the start of the work day, “this is never going to work. Where are the dogs? There should be dogs”.

Though the dogs never appear, pretty much the entire gallery of American grotesquery is thrown at Younger in an attempt to make him talk, subjecting him to everything from water-boarding to amputation. All the while, Brody tries to reason not only with the detainee but his captors. In one scene, she confronts H in the bathroom and tells him what we all think we know: that torture doesn’t work, that it produces unreliable answers from desperate men. “So I guess that’s why they’ve been using it since the beginning of human history, huh?” he responds, barely stopping to look himself in the mirror before returning to the interrogation.

Desperation sets in as Younger’s deadline approaches, and Brody finds herself pleading with him for anything she can take to her superiors. But he’s not talking, his nerve steady after even the most brutal of sessions, actor Michael Sheen in another standout, gritty performance. “I accept my fate. You should accept yours”. He turns his head and winks at his torturers; both equally aware of the game and their roles within it. Oddly for a film that centres so firmly on violence, the most effective and disturbing moment of the picture comes not from a clear escalation of the horror, but from Brody being asked to give Younger a massage, to ease his neck spasms. Classical music fills the chamber, as she begins to slowly rub his neck, conflict etched over her face as she finds herself trapped between maternal feelings for a broken man, and a desire to break him still further. All the while, H patrols the room, scalpel in hand, speaking in measured tones of the pride he has for his work. Younger, now relieved of his tension, begins to sob.

A moment later, and that scalpal is buried in his hand.

Unthinkable is America at war with itself, a film not so much about the heinous crimes of the accused, but the methods of the righteous and how they come to normalise it. Even Brody, for so long resolute in her determination to do the moral thing, finds her standards slipping as time passes; how easy it is to be corrupted when the stakes are raised. “You’ve become one of us”, snorts one of the officers, “oh it’s terrible you say, but then it’s ‘Does it work?’”. The film seems equally unsure of it’s own stance, alternating with its audience between disgust and voyeur, outrage and absolution, right down to the final shot. Is the film asking us to sympathise with H, or to condemn him as a barbarian, as might reflexively Younger?

There are really only questions here, but as he leans in to whisper to his suspect, blood-stained implements of torture littering the workbench, “There is no H and Younger. There is only victory and defeat”, you can’t help but conclude that in every way it matters, we have surely lost.

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Green Zone

Posted on June 20, 2010 by Paul

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Green Zone is a piece of fiction, thrilling and tense, that touches on an uncomfortable but likely truth: that far from being the mistaken result of sketchy intelligence, the war in Iraq was instead a skilful piece of theatre orchestrated by administration officials who knew precisely what they were doing. The exact whys and wherefores presented here may be in service of the story, but we recognise their truths every bit as clearly as we now recognise the lies behind the headlines of the New York Times circa 2003.

The film opens in chaos. In the aftermath of ‘Shock and Awe’, looting is common place and revenge killings stalk the lawless streets of Baghdad. Officer Roy Miller and his team zip around in rickety humvees, searching in the desert for the weapons of mass destruction they – we – were promised. Thumbing through an intelligence file on the way, he barks orders as his team don gas masks and push with purpose through the crowds, storming an abandoned warehouse in downtown Baghdad. Expecting to find botulism or anthrax, they instead open a container to find only toilets; Miller seems wearied but unsurprised. He has come to see an emerging pattern intelligence that leads to nothing but dead ends and dead friends. Later, at a briefing, Miller presses his superiors for answers, but is quickly shut down. Dissent, we learn, isn’t on the agenda in post-war Iraq.

The CIA’s Martin Brown listens with intent from the back of the room, his face disgruntled and crinkle-browed. He is already on the trail of something bigger, and begins to work with Miller on sniffing out the source of the faulty intel. Aided by a WSJ reporter who in kinder hands might have been painted as intrepid, they set about tracking down high-ranking Iraqi officials in the pursuit of answers, amidst a country torn apart by a ramshackle high-command naive to the realities on the ground.

Leading the blind is Greg Kinnear’s Clark Poundstone, (presumably loosely based on real-life coalition head Paul Bremner), who is ever inch the snivelling suit you’d expect, smiling to Milner’s face whilst cutting deals behind his back, as his blind commitment to the cause drives him to greater and greater lengths to reign in Milner and Brown’s investigation. Soldiers and so-called ‘independent contractors’ are dispatched to shut them down. “I thought we were all on the same side”, Milner asks. “Don’t be naive”.

Though it has been dismissed as little more than Bourne Does Iraq, Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass merely use the quick-cut direction of that trilogy as a stepping stone to film-making that cleverly subverts Iraq war stereotypes by making it clear our ‘enemy’ – represented here in both official and unofficial capacities on both sides – were every bit as duplicitous as our leaders in the fall of Baghdad, watching as American troops stumbled down blind alleys, constrained by forces on-high. Roger Ebert described it as “We’re not the heroes, but the dupes”, and after two hours of this fast-paced thriller, it’s as apt a description as you’re likely to find.

The message of the film is that we, as Miller, have been all too ready to succumb to the plausible in place of the true. Green Zone offers few surprises to movie-goers who have been closely following events on the ground and in Washington, but there is something to be said for a film that shines a populist light on a dangerous and complex situation, presenting its story in a tightly focused manner that is palatable without diluting itself to the point of irrelevance. Green Zone plays to the largest crowd possible, and does so with pride.

Purists will scoff at the broad strokes, and detractors will call the film didactic and unnecessary. But, in the end, if Matt Damon’s face on a poster is enough to get Fox viewers to the theatre with open minds, then perhaps soon enough of them will turn off and speak out that a new generation doesn’t need to endure its own Iraq, just as the one before marched to its Vietnam.

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Dexter: Season 4

Posted on May 16, 2010 by Paul

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Dexter Morgan is a serial killer born of blood, rescued from the kind of horrifying scene that only our very best cinematic anti-heroes are born into. In his fourth outing on Showtime’s award-winning and macabre drama Dexter, Michael C. Hall continues to surprise and delight as the multi-faceted lead, revealing new layers of his tortured soul with every episode. A show that began promising little more than killer-of-the-week procedural has now blossomed into a complex, involving and tightly scripted drama.

Premium cable networks like Showtime stand alone in the time and money that have to offer shows like this, and it’s little coincidence that The Wire, oft-heralded as the best TV has to offer, was found on the equally exclusive HBO. The main US networks have certainly contributed their fair share to the cultural rebirth of television over the last decade – Lost, on ABC, being a notable example – yet by and large those shows have suffered, either from the rigours of long seasons or the uneven writing that comes with ad-breaks and Sweeps weeks. Such is their devotion to the twin gods of network TV that you can pinpoint the precise weeks in which the big events happen, where the big name guests will be, and where those crucial dramatic beats will fall. Regular as clockwork, our favourite characters die and are saved, every November, February and May.

Not so with Dexter. Here, with an advert-free season that runs half as long as the competition, the writers and producers have the time to lay the tracks for a thrill ride that feels planned and executed in a way that republican cheap-thrill 24 cannot. The episodes are consistent, and if the finale feels like a crescendo it’s because each episode prior had carefully upped the ante until a crashing ending seems like the logical and artistic next step, not the contractually required end-game.

It starts innocently enough, with a sleep-deprived Morgan struggling to balance family with his so-called ‘Dark Passenger’, the murderous rage bubbling just beneath his suburban surface. In between neighbourhood watch and the school run, he finds himself circling a fellow serial killer, Arthur Mitchell, played to chilling perfection by John Lithgow in a role that would later win him a Golden Globe.

The parallels between Dexter and Arthur lay at the heart of the season. In previous years the show’s writers have used his adversaries to hold a mirror to Dexter’s own life, from his brother’s methodology in the first season to the duplicity of a District Attorney last year, and the same can be said of Season 4. Yet even more so than in the past, this year’s antagonist represents a clear link to the path Dexter is walking. Mitchell is a seemingly happy family man too, but in a complex and frightening performance, Lithgow instils his character with a seething anger that both surprises and delights. Like Dexter, he is a man of many masks, but more than that he is a man with a past he cannot escape, haunted by guilt he cannot deny. Whether by inference or, increasingly, full beam headlights, we are shown how close these two men are in action if not motive, and asked just where we draw the line between characters we love and characters we love to hate.

With but two exceptions, Dexter’s supporting characters serve to either significantly further the central story, or – in the case of his family – act as a moral weight to anchor Morgan’s actions, and provide a frame of reference for his emotional turmoil. In a point repeated to near tedium, Dexter is taunted by his dead father’s words echoing through time: that a man like him can’t have it all, and that to try is to condemn those he loves to a sad fate. Dexter pursues his agenda just as he always has, yet now he doubts not only whether that’s a price worth paying, but whether the life he was born into is the one he must ultimately die for. What if the curse his father bestowed to him is but a choice he makes? It is to that dilemma that his wife (the increasingly enjoyable Julia Benz) and his children contribute time and again, in a relationship that has grown from mere background noise to a point of central importance.

A world away from that center are the characters of LaGuerta and Batista, whom I consider the only exceptions in an otherwise perfect ensemble. Exceptions to what, you might ask? Interlinked stories. Interest. Intrigue. *Reason*. LaGuerta has always been a largely worthless character, filling the requisite role of The Man and little more, and as such her increasingly sad stalking of police halls is to be expected, if not welcomed. Angel Batista, meanwhile, whilst traditionally something of an auxillary figure, has at least always offered something real, be it the role of friend and confidant (Season 1), or as a tightly integrated character in the central arc (Season 2). Yet now he is merely time-filler, reduced to investigating LaGuerta’s cobwebbed panties for *an entire season*.

What then, of my claim that the show exists apart from the demands of network TV, in which characters and plots like those of LaGuerta are forced to exist? It’s a fractured claim, for sure, but only barely. On the points that will be remembered a world away from here, primarily the story and its delivery, it holds truer than it has since the very first year. In Dexter we have a flawed hero with little heroism about him other than the desire to be a better person, and in his enemies we see through a glass, darkly; a portrait of a man yet to come.

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