Battle Scars

How 2006 movies felt the pain of war.

by Cindy Fuchs

You hardly needed to duck into theaters to see war images this year. And yet, war stories — documentaries and features — made for some of the most gripping, provocative and outraged offerings of 2006. Some delved incisively into longstanding cultural battles (Almodóvar's Volver and Mary Harron's The Notorious Bettie Page, most effectively), and many others took up war literally. Some targeted present-day proceedings (the excellent documentaries Why We Fight and Shut Up and Sing or Irwin Winkler's not-so-good but infinitely well-intentioned Home of the Brave). Others found effective allegories for current events in the past (Kevin MacDonald's The Last King of Scotland) or future (the Sci-Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica and Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men). In every case, even when aggression and conflict stayed beneath the surface, these war stories comprised a poignant, critical and resolute resistance to business as usual.

The best movie I saw this year is James Longley's Iraq in Fragments. Lyrical, hectic and moving as hell, it observes the disintegration of Iraq into pieces, weaving together stories from three areas (the Kurdish north, Sunni middle and Shiite south), with children at the urgent center. It forms something of a companion piece to Laura Poitras' more conventionally structured My Country, My Country, which follows a Sunni Arab doctor as he runs for office in the January 2005 elections, detailing the breakdown of infrastructure and hope.

Michael Winterbottom's The Road to Guantánamo reveals destruction by way of deconstruction, skipping between interviews with three British Muslims held by the U.S. without charge for some two years and re-enactments of their experiences at Guantánamo. Its complex structure is at once dramatic and provocative, interrogating the slippage and fictions practiced by the U.S., in terms of language, ideals and conduct.

Another sort of collapse is seen in The War Tapes. Directed by Deborah Scranton, edited in large part by Steve James and shot largely by New Hampshire National Guardsmen in Iraq, the documentary illustrates the patterns of destruction, and lack of clear mission that characterize the U.S. endeavor in post-Saddam Iraq. Feeling abandoned and confused, the troops seek moral grounding in day-to-day interactions with a population increasingly distrustful of them.

Fury and disappointment also drive Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Verging on monumental, the four-hour film shows that individual errors and systemic shortcomings created the tragedy of Katrina. At once sweeping and specific, it argues that racism and classism, those twin pillars of U.S. economics and politics, occasioned the storm's effects. As it shows what continues to go wrong in a rich, distressing array of images, Levees won't let you forget that the cluster of events and ignorance called "Katrina" is political in the most significant sense.

Ward Serrill's The Heart of the Game — certainly not a war movie per se — is nonetheless an elegant, intelligent and pointed examination of constant struggle. Tracing the Seattle high school basketball career of the insanely gifted and hardworking Darnellia Russell, the film exposes ongoing inequities of high school sports with regard to women players. Heart considers issues specific to girls, including a sexually abusive coach one player hires to improve her personal game, and the subtle and unsubtle ways that misogyny still shapes expectations for female athletes and girls with ambitions.

Another girl is the focus of 2006's best fiction feature, Guillermo del Toro's WWII fairy tale, Pan's Labyrinth. It follows the imaginative adventures of 12-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), as she and her pregnant mother Carmen attempt to make a new life in Fascist Spain. Horrified by her stepfather, the fierce Captain Vidal (Sergi López), Ofelia discovers that she may be a long-lost princess, destined to complete a series of tasks laid out by Doug Jones' faun. The dark, weird world into which she descends features a giant toad, a pale man who holds his eyes in his palms, and that faun, equally enchanting and scary, with whom she feels a particular connection.

Marie Antoinette

The warfare in Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette is less obvious but equally central to a plot many viewers derided as apolitical. Kirsten Dunst's teenaged queen learns to survive in a foreign land, where her primary mission in life is to produce an heir with Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman). As she indulges in costumes and sugary foodstuffs (and eventually does seduce her husband), Louis' support of American revolutionaries adds to France's financial demise, leading to the French Revolution and the royals' execution. Leaving these well-known results offscreen, Coppola's film instead observes cause and context, namely, the ruling class' excess and intransigence, its utter inability to see beyond itself.

A similar theme laces its way through Clint Eastwood's twofer, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima. Interrogating the state's construction of seemingly individual "heroes" in order to perpetuate (and finance) WWII, Flags digs into the emotional and moral costs paid by combat survivors. Letters looks at loss in war, and worse, the anticipation of loss. Letters' effectiveness lies in its indictment of the social and political structures that support war: obedience and chains of command, discipline and faith. Knowing he and his troops will fall, General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) gives his valedictory: "Maybe the stand on the island will be futile, maybe the whole war is futile," but "if our children can live more safely for one more day, it would be worth the one more day that we defend this island." However it's phrased, the rationale for war is always the future. This is precisely what's lost to those who fight, whether they come back with devastating memories or don't come back at all. The movie makes clear the circularity of the problem, beginning and ending with a young soldier, Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), on the beach. At first he's digging trenches, and by film's end, he's swinging his shovel at the air.

Futility also afflicts characters in two of 2006's more innovative features. The first, Neill Dela Llana and Ian Gamazon's Cavite, follows Adam, a Filipino-American security guard (Gamazon), as he is forced to commit a terrorist bombing in the Philippines. Filmed with one camera and a minuscule budget, the film sucks you into Adam's immediate, impossible experience, revealing at once the most crass and banal means and motives of seeming terrorists.

A Scanner Darkly

In Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, the "war on drugs" comes under scrutiny, as agents in "scramble suits" and addicts of all kinds literally lose themselves, their identities shattered as surely as if they'd been blown up by bombs. The state remains intact by turning victims and aggressors against one another in endless cycles of self-definition. This very idea is made visible in Linklater's further experimentation with rotoscoping. The familiar stars — Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr. — here slip in and out of view, their animated bodies shimmering and shifting, their pasts and presents unfixed, their addictions the only thing that gives them meaning.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)