'Gunner Palace'
MOVIE REVIEW
Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
March 4, 2005
Who in America, no matter how highly placed, couldn't honestly confess to Iraq information overload, to having taken in enough about that beleaguered country and its ceaseless crises to last several lifetimes? But no matter how Baghdad-ed out you may feel, make room for "Gunner Palace," a striking new documentary that shows the war in a way it's not been seen before: from the ground up.
The gunners of the title are the 400 or so members of a stationed-in-Baghdad U.S. Army artillery brigade that Michael Tucker (who co-directed the film with Petra Epperlein) spent two separate one-month periods with in 2003 and 2004.
The palace in which the gunners are housed is no euphemism: It is the former pleasure dome of Saddam Hussein's son Uday Hussein, complete with swimming pool and putting green and located in the Adhamiya area of the city, one of the deposed leader's former strongholds.
Unlike the usual documentary procedure, "Gunner Palace" doesn't single out one or two soldiers to follow through the city's mean streets. What it aims for and achieves instead is a group portrait of today's volunteer army, what it's up to and up against in Iraq.
As opposed to the fulsome official rhetoric we hear from time to time on the soundtrack, "Gunner Palace" shows us what grunt-level existence is really like for beleaguered but unbowed U.S. troops. We see the grittiness and the tedium, the heightened unreality and the ever-present danger that make up day-to-day life in this peculiar war zone.
As one of the soldiers laconically puts it, "For y'all, this is just a show, but we live in this movie."
...
The soldiers in "Gunner Palace" are mostly without illusions of any kind, like the man who challenges the audience back home when he poignantly says, "You'll forget all this. The only people who'll remember it is us."
It is this film's accomplishment that it has made sure that won't happen any time soon.
Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
