Dense fog
History takes a break in Matt Damon’s ‘Green Zone’
By Carl Kozlowski 03/18/2010
Normally I prefer to screen a film with as little advance knowledge as possible. However, because “Green Zone” freely mixes fact and fiction in a blur of dramatic storytelling, it’s best to have sufficient knowledge to separate the two.
The film is inspired by the nonfiction book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” written by journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran. For director Paul Greengrass, the book provided an invaluable guide to recreating the compound that housed American administrators during the early part of the occupation of Iraq. The compound, converted from Saddam Hussein’s luxurious Baghdad palace, was known as “The Green Zone.” Here, Americans worked, ate, caroused and swam in its many pools, seemingly unaware of the suffering just outside its walls. Therefore, it follows that those charged with Iraq’s reconstruction were out of touch with reality.
The group staying within the Green Zone constituted the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, led by L. Paul Bremer, who in turn took his marching orders from US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The early days of occupation were marked by a series of wrongheaded decisions, such as disbanding Iraq’s police force and military, thereby making enemies of those best positioned to help us. Coincidentally, these same citizens had access to conventional weapons cached throughout Iraq.
The film departs from the facts in the following manner: It bases some of its fictional characters on actual characters while plucking others from thin air. Most notably invented is Matt Damon’s character, Chief Army Warrant Officer Roy Miller. His unit, charged with finding evidence of WMDs, investigates dozens of locations, repeatedly coming up empty-handed. Miller questions the intelligence responsible for these risky missions and, after being stonewalled by superiors, follows his nose to investigate that intelligence further.
The film really gets fiction-y when Miller defies orders issued by Clark Poundstone (Bremer’s stand-in played by Greg Kinnear), in order to follow leads from CIA operative Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson, who seems at home wearing Colombo’s rumpled suits).
What follows is a fairly engaging game of cat and mouse as Miller and Brown attempt to locate and question an Iraqi military leader sought by Poundstone. The film slides deeper and deeper into the conspiracy theory abyss, but while the story goes off the reality-reservation, the setting provides fascinating information about conditions outside the Green Zone. As Miller and a handful of his loyal underlings cruise Baghdad’s alternately cluttered or abandoned streets, they are repeatedly confronted with the suffering of Iraqi citizens — long oppressed under Hussein’s regime only to find themselves neglected, doubted and sometimes abused by their would-be American liberators.
Damon’s performance is credibly understated right up to the moment his character discerns the big picture based on fragments of evidence. This aha moment ought to belong to Martin Brown — the on-site CIA operative who, along with a small fleet of trained analysts, sorts through piles of intel. This may seem a quibbling complaint, but it’s an inescapable conclusion.
It was unnecessary to rope us by fictionalizing the action because everything that is most memorable about this film is rooted in fact. Rather than the “what if” thriller, we are most shocked and awed when the fog of war clears enough to see beyond the assumptions to which our leaders were wedded.
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