On the heels of Karl Rove's improbable assertion that George W. Bush would not have gone to war with Iraq if he had thought there were no WMD comes another narrative about our missteps into war and the confusing months following the invasion.
Paul Greengrass' new movie, Green Zone, makes no bones about its loose relationship with the truth, even though it is adapted from a nonfiction book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (2006). It's a high-octane, high-budget, Bourne-esque thriller brimming with sweaty cinematic detail, but there's no mistaking its loud agenda.
At the center of the action is Matt Damon, who plays U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller. His assignment to evacuate a string of would-be WMD sites near Baghdad leaves him obsessed with uncovering the truth instead. It's 2003, Saddam Hussein is still in hiding and the Downing Street Memo has yet to surface in the media.
"Our idea was to have a character who was a good solider who went there thinking he was going to find something," Damon, a longtime outspoken liberal, told the Huffington Post at a recent press day. "He got there and didn't find it, and then asked the question why, which I think is kind of what happened for all of us. We were told something was going to happen and it didn't, and then we went, 'How did we get here? Oh yeah, the weapons. Where were they?'"
Miller is based on a real WMD hunter, Monty Gonzales, who led a mobile exploitation team racing other teams to find nuclear weapons toward the beginning of the war. The first site Monty visited, intel packet in hand, was a porcelain factory listed as a dual-use facility because it was a suspected cover for making WMD.
"He went in there and looked around and said, 'This is all bullshit,'" Damon said. "From the first site he went into, he knew there was something horribly wrong. He said, 'There's no way a rational person could come in and say they're making something here other than porcelain because that's all this place can do.'"
Miller is driven by a question that dogged Congress for years: how can we have highly detailed intelligence that is so wrong? The parties that can answer this question are, for the purpose of the film, boiled down to a few major players.
Defense Intelligence agent Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) is a neocon more or less responsible for shaping the intelligence around the policy. A Wall Street Journal reporter (Amy Ryan) functions as no more than Poundstone's mouthpiece, and the CIA station chief (Brendan Gleeson) is a good guy in the dark. A friendly Iraqi civilian (Khalid Abdalla) risks his life to help Miller capture some high-ranking Baathists because he believes it's a step toward freedom.
The world of the Green Zone, with its shimmering pool, Pizza Hut and bikini-clad women, makes it easy for Americans to remain disconnected from what's happening on the ground.
"When we read Chandrasekaran's book, that provided the perfect setting," Damon said. "It was this sort of surreal Green Zone where there's all kinds of conspiracy and paranoia and intrigue because that's where everyone went to build this shining city on the hill."
The story is a familiar one, and heavy-handed in its reduction to a few characters and 115 minutes. Will Miller find WMD in Iraq? Will American reconstruction efforts in Baghdad go as planned in the face of growing insurgency? Of course not, but there are enough frenetic firefights to maintain a satisfying level of suspense.
Greengrass wants the movie (shot in Morocco's bleakest desert) to take the viewer into a war zone, and his characteristically shaky camerawork is both effective and annoying. The urgency is carefully packaged for the big screen, but it's hard to forget the clock is also ticking in real time.
That nearly all of the men leaping from Black Hawk helicopters and perched atop Humvees are real-life soldiers between tours of Iraq or Afghanistan drives home the point all the more.
Green Zone opens March 12.