September 21, 2004
TORONTO TOP 10 from Anton Sirius! Plus reviews of LIBERTINE, DIRTY SHAME, RAY and GUNNER PALACE!!!
Anton Sirius, Ain´t It Cool News
Gunner Palace (2004, directed by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein)
A companion piece of sorts to Fahrenheit 9/11, Gunner Palace is a ground-level view of US troops in Baghdad, specifically the crew stationed in Uday Hussein's old pleasure palace. Their life during wartime is surreal. They patrol the streets by day, conduct raids at night, live with the justifiable paranoia of an occupying force, and then come home to a swimming pool and putting greens.
There's no attempt to show a bigger picture here. Gunner Palace concerns itself exclusively with who these troopers are as people and as soldiers, and how they deal with the madness around them. Although there's no overt political agenda to the film (although, to be fair, it does open with a jab at Donald Rumsfeld), politics inevitably joins the party. As the film rolls forward the mood darkens. Baghdad becomes more dangerous, average Iraqis become increasingly hostile, former allies turn on the Americans, and the death toll among these kids who you've been getting to know so well, who are so obviously just like the kids working at the 7/11 and coming home from college with a bagful of dirty laundry, gets both heartbreaking and infuriating. The question hangs in the air, unasked and unanswerable: what the hell are these kids dying for?
Gunner Palace is one of those films that future historians are going to use as proof that the entire country didn't all go crazy early in the 21st century, that a few people managed to retain both sense and perspective.
