A Gritty, Stark War Documentary
Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal
March 4, 2005; Page W1
"Gunner Palace" expands our vocabularies. The musical language of this startling documentary about U.S. troops in Iraq is hip-hop; if Vietnam was a rock 'n' roll war, Iraq turns grunts into rappers. The spoken language is raw, though it won't prevent those under 17 from seeing the film, thanks to a wise decision by the movie industry's Ratings Appeals Board to change its initial R rating to PG-13. (The filmmakers' appeal had argued, sensibly enough, that older teens who might be considering military careers should be able to get a sense of what they're signing up for.) The language also contains new euphemisms: Under the negotiated terms of a "soft compliant entry," G.I.'s are able to arrest a former government official without breaking his door down. And the visual language is stark. This is not a film constrained by the conventions of TV news. Rather, it's a brash, unembedded entry into the lives of soldiers fighting in a surpassingly foreign land.
The setting is Baghdad in 2003, four months after President Bush declared the end of major combat operations. The troops are members of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, some 400 men and women, known as the "Gunners," who are billeted in the bombed-out shell of a palace previously occupied by Saddam Hussein's son Uday, and his many paramours. "We dropped a bomb on it," one enlisted man says cheerfully, "now we party in it."
This garish palatial wreck, with its swimming pool, putting green and rat-infested rooms, is no more surreal than the work of its current occupants, whose ironic term for what they do is "minor combat." But "Gunner Palace," which was directed by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, eschews easy ironies of its own. Neither antiwar nor pro-, it's a portrait of American soldiers as they're rarely if ever seen on mainstream TV -- angry, confused, cynical, flamingly foul-mouthed, constantly scared and yet, in the midst of Baghdad's lethal chaos, improbably good-natured and steadfastly brave. (A coda lists the names of five soldiers and three Iraqi nationals, all connected to the unit, who died during the year the film was in production.)
We know, from the casualty figures on TV, how dangerous this duty is. The film shows how confoundingly hard it is. Soldiers trained, in the narrator's words, to stop a Russian advance must now contend with a crazy-making range of circumstances. They stop traffic for 15 minutes until a suspicious-looking plastic bag can be examined. (The bag turns out to be empty). They function as truant officers, taking a glue-sniffing Iraqi kid off the street. They guide a rambling debate in an Iraqi district town meeting with unflagging patience. They burst into the house of suspected bomb-builders. (No bombs are found, but several residents are detained, then transferred to Abu Ghraib prison.) And, night after night, they go out on patrol in neighborhoods where, at any moment, they can be pinned down by sniper fire, or blown apart by improvised explosive devices.
No wonder, then, that these sorely tried men and women feel unappreciated. "If they don't have any family in the military," says Sgt. Robert Beatty, referring to Americans at home, "it's entertainment for them." Several soldiers, playing to the camera, laugh uproariously as one of their buddies speculates wryly that improvised armor, hung on thin-skinned Humvees, "will probably slow down the shrapnel so that it stays in your body instead of going clean through." ...
"Gunner Palace" is yet another documentary that fulfills the promise of the digital revolution. Mr. Tucker, who did the camera work, went off to Iraq with lightweight equipment, shot on the fly, much as TV cameramen were able to do in Vietnam, yet came back with the makings of a theatrical film. But Iraq is not Vietnam in at least one indisputable respect -- the official and practical restrictions with which most journalists now struggle. If TV made Vietnam the living-room war, splashed across the nation's screens in all its horror, today's networks have turned Iraq into a rec-room war -- long on drama, suspense and special effects, but miserably short on texture, let alone context.
That makes the grittily textured scenes of "Gunner Palace" all the more indispensable to a grasp of current events. But there's a catch, and it isn't 22. A shining promise of the multiplex revolution remains unfulfilled, the one about each 'plex devoting at least a single screen to offbeat indie features and documentaries. In fact, documentaries get the shortest of shrift from most exhibitors, so you may have to find this rousing, provocative film on your own. The Web site, www.gunnerpalace.com is the place to start.
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Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal
