Green Zone

Pass-Fail: Pass. I liked Green Zone.

Matt Damon plays Roy Miller, a Chief Warrant Officer desperate to save lives by doing his job - finding and deactivating weapons of mass destruction. Damon's innate ability to seem like the smartest guy in the room serves him well in Green Zone, since he's the only person to pick up on the disconnect between the intelligence he's been given and the absence of WMDs. For his perceptiveness he is, of course, approached by the CIA (Brendan Gleeson’s thwarted Martin Brown) and the White House (Greg Kinnear’s unsavory Clark Poundstone). Like the Damon/Greengrass Bourne creation, Miller is above all a pursuer of truth. So he digs. While his team digs for buried WMDs, Miller collaborates with Freddy (Khalid Abdalla - charismatic and remarkably profound), an Iraqi man who shares information about high-ranking Iraqi officials who have been in hiding. They are both brave men in bad situations, men with the best of intentions and a near lack of influence. Still, neither man harbors any illusions about the danger they face.

Katherine Bigelow has proven that war films are no longer just games for men to play, but Paul Greengrass's Green Zone seems to think that war itself is still just a man's game. I wonder if it's a coincidence that the only role for a woman in the script (besides wailing victim) is that which represents the media and its willingness to deliver any message the White House would have sent. Like a wife blind to her husband's affair, or a puppy nipping at her beloved owner's feet, Washington Post reporter Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan) pursues her ‘insider source’ Poundstone for whatever more information she can find. An absence of WMDs is an enemy ploy in her eyes and could be nothing else. Miller, with his grand ideas of protecting millions of people, is unwilling to dispel his suspicion, even for the sake of doing his job and getting home safely, as many members of his team aim to do. Leave it to Damon to take on a role in which he is forced to fight at every turn: enemy forces, riotous Iraqi crowds, and even an American Special Forces agent. Asked to take steps against a federal investigation Miller says, "I thought we were on the same side." "Don't be naive," he is told.

Now, I know I'm not the first reviewer, and I confess I read other reviews before writing mine. As Ebert points out, it's refreshing to see America as the duped. And yeah, maybe it's anti-war blah blah tons of hand-held camera blah Bourne blah blah whatever. I know I don't know enough about politics to speak about its truth or accuracy, and I certainly didn't read the book on which it is based (Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, Rajiv Chandrasekaran). But I appreciate being shown the unexpected victims of one man's actions. I like seeing clues interpreted and puzzles pieced together. And if Matt Damon's going to look like the smartest guy in the room, I'm glad he is at least one of them. There were a number of little things that gave the film some kick, from a family photo op with a tanker posed just inside the green zone, to the Jason Isaac's dismissive, "have a nice war." I think I've heard it before - maybe in The Hurt Locker, from which Green Zone will draw unavoidable comparison - but as an uninitiated civilian, it stings nonetheless.

A great many people, political organizations, representatives, and Kinnear's Poundstone character would prefer to think that America has won, or is at least in the lead in the middle eastern battles still being forged today. As far as I can tell, Green Zone makes this one point abundantly clear: so long as there is war to be waged, no one will win.