CineScene--By and For Movie Lovers

Lambs to the Slaughter
by Howard Schumann

While corporate-owned television stations are preoccupied with ratings and celebrity scandals, movies may be the only vehicle left that can take an honest look at U.S. foreign policy issues and their impact on society. Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan (The Kingdom), Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs attempts what radio, television, and news media have not provided – a focused debate on the war on terror, particularly on U.S. policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. It does so by setting up three situations in which ideas are presented and discussed by plausible and intelligent spokespersons. One is an interview of a conservative U.S. Senator by a liberal reporter, the other between a professor and a student, and the third, a dramatization of idealistic soldiers sacrificed for a failed policy.

Meryl Streep is Jeanine Roth, a somewhat jaded journalist who is given a one hour interview by up-and-coming Republican Senator Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise). He provides her with a briefing about a new policy in Afghanistan that involves sending small groups to secure advance mountainous positions ahead of the spring thaw and prevent the uniting of Shia and Sunni forces. Focusing on Iraq, Iran, 9/11, the "war on terror," and battle strategy, Cruise is charming and convincing as the mouthpiece for the government’s policy, while Streep is disdainful and tough minded. Their verbal sparring is poignantly effective but ultimately leads nowhere.

In the second episode, Redford is a professor at an unnamed California University who tries to convince Todd Hayes (Andrew Garfield), a bright but apathetic studen,t to adopt a position of more involvement and responsibility. While the Redford-Garfield interchange is quite affecting and Redford is as charming as ever, it is not clear if the professor is attempting to make his student a political activist or just a more committed student. To make a point about commitment, he tells Todd about two of his former students who volunteered for active duty in Afghanistan against his advice and their odyssey in Afghanistan is shown in flashback.

The Chinook helicopter they are traveling in is fired upon while attempting a landing in a mountainous part of Afghanistan. Arian Finch (Derek Luke) and Ernest Rodriguez (Michael Peña), jump from the helicopter without chutes and land in the snow. As another helicopter attempts a rescue, the two are fired on by hooded and shadowy insurgents. While the segment is powerful in showing how some soldiers enlist to make a difference, what remains unstated is that the vast majority of enlistees come from the poorest areas of the country and join the military for practical reasons - finding a career and making enough money to live on.

Lions for Lambs should be given credit for attempting to open the discussion to a wider audience, but considering the fact that only one quarter of the people still support the administration’s policy, the debate is improperly framed and feels like an anachronism. Key questions are ignored: the justification for our being in Iraq in the first place, whether or not the occupation constitutes imperialism, whether the war is about freedom or oil, and how best to extricate ourselves from a tragic mistake. Even further, the central issue of America’s proper role in a world in which it is no longer respected is ignored.

Compared, for instance, to My Dinner with Andre, a film that featured a two-hour conversation about different philosophical points of view, resulting in the growth of the characters and a transforming experience for the viewer, Lions for Lambs is superficial, offering only verbal sparring that skims the surface and tells us mostly what we already know. While the film does hit some targets, including the complicity of the media in forwarding the aims of the government, Redford is so cautious about being called one-sided that he seems to be simultaneously waving the flag and carrying a protest sign, and the film often feels more like a circus juggling act than an exercise in political relevance.

Brian De Palma's Redacted ups the ante of protest films, fictionally recounting the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers in 2006. Using hand-held camera surveillance footage, internet videos, excerpts from a French documentary and an Arab TV channel, Islamic fundamentalist websites, and the fictional camcorder diary of a young U.S. private, De Palma lets us know not only about the atrocities of war but about the unreliability of the way in which information is presented in the media and how we cannot trust what we see, even in his film.

Seemingly modeled after De Palma’s earlier Vietnam film Casualties of War, Redacted searches for a truth in fiction that is deeper than reality-based documentary. Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) carries a video camera around, shooting whatever he sees, hoping to make a documentary that will be his ticket to film school. We are first introduced to his unit: Gabe Blix (Kel O'Neill), Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney), Sergeant Jim Sweet (Ty Jones) and good ol’ boys Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll) and B.B. Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman). The videos make it apparent that our soldiers have lost their sense of purpose and are no longer on solid emotional ground.

The hand-held video camera is then replaced by a French documentary about the soldier’s routine at checkpoints in Samarra. Suddenly, a speeding car is approaching. Interpreting the signals by U.S. personnel to slow down as meaning they are being waved on through, the car is gunned down, killing a pregnant woman and her unborn child. After a member of Salazar’s unit is killed by a bomb, the two men who fired on the speeding car, Rush and Flake, invade the home of an Iraqi family in retribution and to enjoy the “spoils of war.” In the middle of the night, they rape and murder a fourteen-year old girl, kill her family, and set the house on fire.

The sensitive Blix does not want to be involved with the mission, and McCoy goes along to try and prevent more harm, but fails to stop the violence. Flake and Rush tell the rest of the company that any word of this incident will result in their death. The incident is seen only with a flickering light and the actual assault takes place off camera, but the scene nonetheless elicits a feeling of disgust. As if to try to show that the horrors of war are not limited to one side, de Palma shows the abduction and beheading of a U.S. soldier in very graphic terms. In the final gut-wrenching sequence, a montage labeled “Collateral Damage” brings truth and fiction together as we see actual footage of Iraqi war victims mixed with staged deaths and faces that are redacted with black pens.

While Redacted is flawed by inconsistent acting and overly didactic add-ons, its impact is extremely powerful. De Palma indicts both the stupidity of the U.S. government for initiating the war, the complicity of the media in presenting us with a sanitized version of it, and a culture in which such atrocities are permitted to occur. Like the films of French director Bruno Dumont that show how meaningless violence generates more meaningless violence, the visceral impact of Redacted will stay with you for a long time. Slapping us in the face to show us how we have lost touch with the reality of war, the film is full of elemental passion, untidy, disjointed, and at times over-the-top, but in Dumont’s words, it returns us “to the body, to the heart, to truth.”