The Hurt Locker, which last weekend picked up Academy Awards for best picture and its director, Kathryn Bigelow, is just the latest, although in some ways it's also one of the first. The film actually had its North American premiere at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival.
(In a bizarre coincidence, attendees that year could have watched future Oscar-winner Slumdog Millionaire on a Wednesday morning at the Ryerson theatre, had lunch and returned for The Hurt Locker in the afternoon.)
The film, available on DVD and also in limited theatrical re-release this weekend, tells the story of a U.S. Army bomb squad in Iraq. Despite the incendiary nature of their work, the film is oddly quiet, and achingly tense. The key acoustic theme is not the detonation of improvised explosive devices but the ticking clock that precedes the blast.
Part of the film's success comes from its on-the-ground viewpoint. Regardless of whether one supports or condemns the war, it is an ongoing reality that must be dealt with, and no one deals with it as viscerally as the soldiers in theatre.
Oddly, some of the biggest critical successes in the realm of Iraq war movies deal with events on the home front. The Messenger stars Woody Harrelson (Oscar-nominated for the role) and Ben Foster as casualty notification officers; their job is to deliver news of a soldier's death to his or her next of kin, preferably before anyone else can.
The Messenger has made only about US$1-million in theatres, but boasts a 90% approval rating from critics at rottentomatoes.com. It also had an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay; it lost to The Hurt Locker. Again, the tone is apolitical, focusing on the emotionally messy but necessary function of notification rather than the decisions that put people in harm's way. Soldiers on the battlefield know that policy ceases to matter once their boots are on the ground.
Oddly, a similar thesis is behind the 2007 film Lions for Lambs, which earned US$15-million on the strength of its all-star cast (Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise and Robert Redford, who also directed) but was derided by critics as a poli-sci lecture trying to pass itself off as a movie. Lions earned a mere 27% approval rating at rottentomatoes.com, a nadir among contemporary Iraq films that included The Kingdom (51%), Rendition (47%) and Redacted (44%).
Mention of these titles suggests a more prosaic reason for their failure: What the heck do they mean? Lions for Lambs takes its name from an obscure reference by First World War German soldiers, that their British adversaries were courageous fighters led by incompetent sheep. But the odd structure recalls Jews for Jesus or Conservatives for Patients' Rights -- are these lions supporting lambs in some way?
Other titles have been equally problematic. Brian De Palma's Redacted needs an asterisk leading to an explanation that it refers to military censorship. Rendition is a noun that appears to have no corresponding verb or adjective. Renditioned? Renditioning? (Turns out it's a form of "render.")
Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah confused some viewers over the issue of pronunciation ("Ee-lah?" "Ay-law?") and was lost on those who didn't recognize it as the Biblical site of David's victory over Goliath. Jarhead, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, should really have been called Jaarhead. The Hurt Locker, in comparison, could have won an Oscar for best use of metaphor in a title.
Kidding aside, it seems Hollywood needs some distance from the fog of war before it can do it cinematic justice. The first crop of exemplary Vietnam War movies (The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, The Boys in Company C) hit theatres in the late 1970s, several years after the fall of Saigon. A second platoon (Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill) followed a decade later. By that timetable, The Hurt Locker is ahead of the curve. The actual war is another matte.
Source:nationalpost.com/
