My Country, My Country

The prevailing trend in documentary filmmaking is to abandon the illusion of objectivity. Michael Moore might be most responsible for this development, stepping out from behind the camera to be an active participant in the filmmaking itself, in the entertainment that his movies provide, and in helping to shape the events that his films portray. This has been Moore’s shtick since Roger and Me. Kirby Dick follows Moore’s general lead with his recent This Film is Not Yet Rated, and does so with a great measure of success.

The astounding feats of Ken Burns have also played a factor. Not content to merely record history, the Burns approach—as epitomized in his Civil War masterwork—is to impose a moral from the outside, either through scripted narration or talking-head commentary. The U.S. vs. John Lennon, for instance, also released today, adopts this approach, artificially connecting the Nixon era with the present Bush administration.

Granted, every film, documentary or otherwise, is subjective. We only see the material the director wants us to see, and we see it all from only one point of view. But clearly, not all documentaries are created equal. Those with scripted narrations by default add a dimension of editorial commentary. Talking heads—even when selected for their broad range of perspectives, as in Lennon—inevitably betray the filmmaker’s bias to some degree. When soundtracks and graphics are added, the full range of cinematic tools is manipulatively in play.

Still, My Country, My Country is a refreshing and compelling throwback to old-fashioned documentary filmmaking, an approach in which the filmmaker documents but does not (for the most part) participate, and whose filmed and edited sequences provide all the commentary, irony, and insight we need to interpret events.

The subject of director Laura Poitras’ film is a Baghdad physician whom Poitras met while visiting Abu Ghraib. Working alone in the field, doing her own camera and sound work, Poitras follows Dr. Riyadh from July of 2004 through the national Iraqi elections in January of 2005. Riyadh, a devout Muslim, is on the minority Sunni ticket, which takes a trouncing. The story of his candidacy brings Poitras—and us—into contact with the doctor’s patients, his six children and wife, coalition troops and officers, journalists, UN elections officials, and an Australian contracting firm hired to provide security for the elections.

This is a vision of Iraq in which no one is particularly happy, and which offers little sense of joy or redemption. As Riyadh declares his candidacy and the election draws nearer, he acknowledges the “added risk” this brings his family—and as it is, Riyadh’s family can scarcely leave their apartment without witnessing some assault or another. Even come election day, they still have no electricity or running water. All the while, IEDs, bombs and gunfire rattle the streets outside. In one particularly telling scene, Riyadh’s wife casually sits on the couch swatting flies, oblivious to the automatic weapons fire just outside the draped windows.

The Australian security forces are also neither Rambos nor knockoffs of late fellow Aussie Steve Irwin. They are sober, tense, and often frightened. There are no hoo-rah Marines in Poitras’ film, either, nor are there protesting peaceniks. Instead, the soldiers we meet are all clearly affected by the tension between constant danger, the desperate conditions of the Iraqis they are in country to aid, and the political stakes of an election on which their future, with Iraq’s, literally hinges. During one orientation session with the troops, an officer shows pictures of two Iraqi members of his reconnaissance team, killed by an IED. He breaks into tears and struggles to convince the troops that it’s not all danger and bloodshed, that “You can have some fun” while on tour in Iraq, his voicing quavering all the while.

The soundtrack was composed by the Iraqi singer Kadhum al Sahir. As a result, it provides atmosphere and relevance without summoning up a Western interpretive grid. To the extent that music is purely universal in its modes of communication, al Sahir’s music helps us read events, yes, but in a way that is indigenous to the setting. The translated lyrics to the movie’s theme, “Oh My Country,” are a call to “love, peace, intellect and construction,” a call to unity, a plea to see Iraq “smile some day.”

Does Poitras have her own bias? Yes, undoubtedly. The project was, in her own words, “motivated by a sense of despair about the contradictions of the U. S. occupation of Iraq and its project to implement democracy in the Middle East through the use of military force.” Significantly, the lone ray of hope to come through in Poitras’s film—and a mightily bright shining one it is—is the radiant joy on the face of Riyadh’s wife and daughters as they triumphantly return from voting that momentous January day.

Oddly, Poitras’ puts a human face on civilians, soldiers, politicians, and contractors yet never comes in contact with any armed militants, resistance fighters, or terrorists. Why? The film never tells us, so we are left to speculate.

Yet Poitras does us a great favor in bringing us far closer to a sadly real Baghdad than either CNN or Fox has done to date.

Facing the Giants

Time for me to put up or shut up.

Earlier this year, in a commentary regarding Superman Returns published at Jeffrey Overstreet’s Looking Closer, I whined, “It’s always comforting, I guess, to know that my next $200 million Whopper will taste just like my last $200 million Whopper… Sure, [the summer] blockbusters have all been entertaining in their own way, and they delivered what the fan base wanted. But they were not particularly creative. They were certainly not challenging, either artistically or intellectually. And I seriously question whether they are worth the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on making them, or the hundreds of millions more that we spend watching them. As a movie critic, I’m starting to find my chosen artistic milieu morally repugnant.”

In my review of The Descent, I then followed up with these comments: “Marshall’s inventiveness makes Bryan Singer’s latest effort look like the work of a hack... Dollar for entertainment dollar, The Descent delivers. Is it perfect? No. But I’m much more tolerant of artistic imperfection when it’s plain that those involved are doing their absolute best.”

Time for a confession. While I’m very open-minded about independent films that typically open on the arthouse circuit, I’m pretty badly biased against independent films made by Christians, for Christian audiences. I expect pure cheese, and that’s usually what I find. A curious double standard. But it’s time to put that right.

Dollar for production dollar, Facing the Giants is frankly an astounding success. Co-writer, co-producer, director and star Alex Kendrick plays small-town Christian high school football coach Grant Taylor, whose down-and-out Eagles open the film finishing off yet another losing season. When their best offensive player jumps to another school at the beginning of the next season, they’ve got nowhere to go but down. Three games in, and three bad losses to his record, Taylor finds out that his low-paying job is on the line. He’s also been diagnosed as infertile, his car is dying, and his house literally stinks. “What’s God doing?” Taylor moans to his wife. “Why is this so hard?”

It’s time for a reckoning with God. Challenged by a prophetic visit from a prayerful school booster, and fueled by an immersion in the Bible, Taylor develops a radical new vision for himself, and for the Eagles—a vision that’s driven not by the need to win, but by an honest desire to serve and glorify the Lord. When the team (and Taylor’s wife) buy into the vision, everything changes. Taylor himself. The team. The school. Heck, the whole town. The “giants of fear and failure” are all defeated. It’s a contemporary Little House-toned retelling of the David and Goliath story, with football, fertility issues, and Jesus thrown in.

Does the movie have its problems? Yes. But few that are surprising given the film’s budget and relative inexperience of its filmmakers and actors. It’s a very accurate and loving portrayal of what the working out of faith looks like in the vast majority of middle America. It’s honest, and makes no excuses for the less-than-Christian behavior of many of its characters. The script’s gentle sense of humor is engaging and clever. And what may be the best part is that the football sequences show real high schoolers playing real football.

Still, I was troubled that Taylor and his wife—humble though their desires and aspirations are—end up having all their problems solved. I can only be reminded that Facing the Giants portrays only part of the Taylors’ story: that it’s the tale of how they finally became convinced of the power of God to do the impossible, and that it’s not the tale of where God took them from there. I doubt it’s all beer and skittles after the credits roll.

And the film does earn its PG rating for thematic elements. While generic issues of faith tend not to be of concern for American families, the faith portrayed in Facing the Giants is by no means generic. It’s specific, and Jesus is preached and unapologetically proclaimed as Lord and Savior. Presumably, Christians should be proud of that; and just as presumably, non-Christians deserve fair warning, on behalf of their children.

So I’ll take ten Giants for every Superman, honestly. This film is not only entertaining in its own way, hitting on all cylinders for its intended audience, it is also extremely creative. It is competently challenging, artistically and spiritually, if not intellectually. And the artists involved are clearly doing their absolute best.

All the King's Men

We all have our suspicions. We have all found situations in which we think, “Something’s not quite right here.” And very often, we are correct. Many times it turns out that we have been lied to, taken advantage of, duped and deceived.

Jack Burden, the narrator of All the King’s Men, describes that feeling as a nagging distraction, “the way an offstage noise bothers you.” He speaks, I think, as an actor, one trying to concentrate on the role he’s been given to play, one distracted by on offstage movement that destroys “being in the moment.” Just for a second, that noise takes you away from your performance, reminding you of what’s real, and what’s just a fantasy.

There’s a lot of fantasy filling up writer-director Steve Zaillian’s film, the second adapted from Robert Penn Warren’s classic novel. First there are the fantasies that we, as an audience, bring to stories about politicians, myths of corruption and power plays. Then there are the fantasies that Burden harbors about his idyllic past, about his mother, his stepfather, his best friend, and his lost love. There’s the fantasies that Willie Stark appears to entertain about the role he’s been given to play in the tale—the populist hero Governor sent from podunkville to the state capitol in order to teach the state of Louisiana a lesson or two.

Trying to figure out where Stark loses track of his fantasy provides the narrative tension for the film. Our first impression of Stark comes during a nighttime road trip to put pressure on an influential retired judge. Even at this point, we can see clearly that Burden is not enamored of the Governor’s tactics (though we don’t know yet exactly why); nor is Burden overly enthusiastic about his role as one of Stark’s “sweet talkers.” From here, we flashback to former reporter Burden’s lily-white recollections of his first encounter with Stark; we learn about Stark’s small-town political failures and his improbable rise to statewide prominence; we come again to that nighttime road trip, as Stark struggles to make good on his campaign promises of reform; and we witness Burden’s take on Stark’s eventual demise. And along the way—a very enjoyable way, if we like about films that take exceptional care in the crafting of their words, the composition of their images, and the portrayal of their characters—we find that a lot of our suspicions are unfounded. We find out that a lot of the time, we are wrong.

What we also find is that we, too, are culpable, not just those we suspect.

Two impulses, Zaillian reveals to us, allow us to reach the wrong conclusions about our suspicions. One tells us not to get involved; it’s the lazy one that tells us, “I’d rather sit here and watch.” Sure, we suspect that something is not right; but figuring that out and correcting it is someone else’s job. Think of Darfur. Think of New Orleans, for God’s sake. Think of a certain September day five years ago.

The second impulse is the one that tells us the truth cannot be known. But Zaillian doesn’t let us off the hook. More than one of characters is wise to the fact that “The only way to not know is not wanting to know.”

Yes, the truth is always out there. But do we really want to know it? Maybe not, and maybe that’s because we’re aware that knowing the truth makes us responsible.

Isn’t it so much easier to shrug it all off? Isn’t it easier to just pin the blame on someone else, to be satisfied with mere suspicion and innuendo?

Flyboys

Well, not all films “based on a true story” are created equal. That’s just a fact.

I’ve seen a lot of these in the last year or so. First there was The Greatest Game Ever Played, which was not the greatest movie ever made; it seemed more interested in CGI scoreboards than it was in golf, and what golf means to people. Then there was End of the Spear, which was a vast improvement, recognizing and finding the core of a story that never grows stale in the retelling. Then Glory Road tried to convince us that the social significance of a story is more compelling than the story itself. More recently, Invincible told the underdog’s tale better than any movie since Rocky (what is it about Philadelphia?); and Gridiron Gang overcame weak performances on the strength of a story that’s just doggone compelling.

All of these films—not just Flyboys—take historical facts and fictionalize them to suit the feature film format. None of them are documentaries; all tell the truth, and tell it a bit slant, to borrow a phrase from Emily Dickinson. The best of them, though, do so in the service of the essence of the story, the broader truth if not the literal one. The less successful efforts get lost in the weeds of secondary issues.

So what is Flyboy’s primary weed?

It’s the fact that the story’s center gets misplaced. At the most general level, it’s the tale of young American men who beat their countrymen to the punch by enlisting with the nascent French air corps better than a year before America enters the war. They are trained to take to the skies, to fly out to almost certain death in aerial combat against better trained and better equipped German pilots. And the interest of the story, according to the filmmakers themselves, comes from the observation that the pilots were the last of a dying breed, “Knights of the Air,” as it were. “World War I was the last time there was a direct connection between combatants in a war,” says Executive Producer Philip Goldfarb. “You were close enough to see the other individual’s face while fighting and flying. There are stories about firing a weapon and the blood of your enemy would literally end up on your windshield and face. It was graphic, but it also gave an intimacy and personal connection that never existed again.” Adds actor James Franco, who portrays the film’s central character, “War had always been face-to-face, man-to-man. The idea was to be knights of the skies; a duel; the last kind of duel, in effect, since modern weapons have taken all that away.”

Now, even if one buys into such a romanticized vision of war and the history of war, the fact is that Flyboys never really gets around to telling that story. What it does get around to is an awful lot of repetitive air battles and sketchy, perfunctory character development; and when the inevitable (and predictable) dueling finally takes place, it’s hard not to scream, “What took you so long?” But even then, the central conflict never carries much moral weight. Do these young men really believe in much of anything besides mere survival?

There may indeed have been a time when there was a certain nobility attached to the conduct of war; and many films have convinced us of that fact: Gallipoli, Glory, Braveheart, Courage Under Fire, even. But we won’t be adding Flyboys to that list any time soon.

This Film is Not Yet Rated

"NC-17: This rating declares that the Rating Board believes this is a film that most parents will consider patently too adult for their youngsters under 17. No children will be admitted. NC-17 does not necessarily mean obscene or pornographic; in the oft-accepted or legal meaning of those words. The Board does not and cannot mark films with those words. These are legal terms for courts to decide. The reasons for the application of an NC-17 rating can be excessive violence, sex, aberrational behavior, drug abuse or any other elements which, when present, most parents would consider too strong and therefore off-limits for viewing by their children."

So goes the MPAA's definition of the NC-17 rating. This Film is Not Yet Rated both exemplifies this rating and explores how the MPAA has implemented its distinctions between the less-restrictive R rating and the boxoffice-kiss-of-death NC-17.

The subtext of Kirby Dick's film, which Dick never really addresses, is exhibitors' reluctance to book films with either no rating or the dreaded NC-17. Why? Because theatres that exhibit NC-17 or unrated films often become the targets of protest. Plenty of watchdog organizations believe that people shouldn't be able to decide for themselves what's prurient or ill-advised entertainment, and they're more than willing to help theatres police themselves. So booking such films is just bad for business.

But what's Dick's beef, really?

First is the inequity with which the MPAA applies the NC-17 rating. As Dick's documentary (sometimes graphically) shows, independent and gay-themed films are rated more harshly than their studio and straight-themed counterparts, based on scene-for-scene comparisons. Second is the veil of secrecy behind which the MPAA "protects" its ratings board members from scrutiny—a veil which Dick's film rips to shreds. Third is the obvious (and covert) influence that the studios wield over the process.

It's this third element that I find most troubling. Though the MPAA's website declares that "No one in the movie industry has the authority or power to push the Board in any direction or otherwise influence it," Dick's film irrefutably demonstrates that this is simply an outright lie. The appeals board is entirely staffed with employees of the major studios and distributors. If that's not influence over the ratings, I don't know what is.

So what value is there in braving Dick's film? If one is not easily shocked by graphic sexuality (which seems to fascinate Dick far more than graphic violence or profanity), the film is certainly educational—if a bit too glib and sophomoric; and viewers should be aware that the bulk of the film's most graphic footage comes in the opening minutes. Most people interested in the subject, however, would be better off to simply read a selection of reviews and essays about the film. There's valuable rational content in this topic, none of which really needs to be reinforced with imagery.

Some words really benefit from being made flesh—I can think of One in particular. Though Dick's documentary is an outstanding contribution to the larger cultural discussion about morality, politics, business, and art, I'm not sure his words profit from so much explicit fleshing out.

Gridiron Gang

One of the things I hate worst about most football movies is that the night games seem to be played during a power outage. This frustrating trend became popular years ago, beginning with the opening scene of Tony Scott's The Last Boy Scout (1991), during which Damon Wayans' Jimmy Dix scampers around a football field seemingly lit with a single desk lamp. I think I had more light than that when I played tipsy-touch football in UW's Red Square at 2 AM one November morning in 1982. It's unsafe, and it's silly.

So part of the really good news of Gridiron Gang—which I fully expected to be a pigskin full of cliches given the obvious pandering opportunities with the MTV/BET and NFL audiences—is that the football games are all played in broad daylight.

The better part of the good news is that Gridiron Gang actually works, in spite of the presence of "The Rock." In fact, I can actually respect the fact that Mr. Rock bills himself on this film using his real name, Dwayne Johnson. Johnson believes in this material, and connects with it deeply himself.

Like the real-life Johnson, the movie deals with juvenile delinquents only one poor choice away from death or a life in jail. While Johnson was steered toward sports just prior to a trip to the slammer, Gridiron Gang tells the more-or-less true story of how corrections officers Sean Porter and Malcolm Moore used football to redirect the lives of California juvenile inmates. Porter played high school ball, while Moore had some NFL experience; and when they grow frustrated with institutional Business as Usual, they introduce discipline, order, and respect in the form of the Mustangs, the facility's own football team. In their first season, they overcome gang history and personal tragedy on their way to the regional championship game.

The story has its share of familiar threads—the Cinderella story, dying family members, personal struggles with the past—but the way in which the story is told reminds us that the real world is a lot messier than most Hollywood screenplays. Winning isn't the only thing that matters; nor is it the only thing that changes reality.

What's best is that the movie is truly inspirational. It reminds us that loyalty and teamwork—the kind that the Apostle Paul talks about in I Corinthians 12—can overcome the deepest of hurts and resentments. It reminds us that reconciliation is a worthy calling, as Paul mentions in II Corinthians 5. It reminds us that loving one’s enemy—as Jesus called for in Matthew 5—is not just a pie-in-the sky ideal but possible in this very real and very messy world.

I don't often recommend a movie, because personal tastes differ so wildly; but I will make an exception in this case. Just don't expect a rose-tinted, feel-good, shock-free experience. Gridiron Gang shows us the dark side of the 'hood and the light side of redemption—and it tells it all true.