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‘Siege”
was the word used to describe the standoff that never
was at The Peninsula Manila Hotel.
For all
the ravages and destructions wrought upon the hotel, The
Pen should—and this is no dark humor—congratulate itself
for the reputation it consistently maintained via TV and
the Internet. Smart and tony were just the two modifiers
dangling close to the name of the hotel as rebels,
renegade and other danger-laden words accompanied its
sojourn in the world’s collective memory that day.
When in
the future a filmmaker decides then to have an APC or a
tank in the middle of a lobby of a luxurious (used also
to describe The Pen) hotel, you know where the
inspiration came from.
War, for
all its realness, is basically a matter of perspectives,
as in debates.
Hollywood
is, at present, caught in this debate. It is a raging
dilemma for artists known for their imagination to
capture for us the popular understanding of the things
taking in the Middle East, in Ay-Rak or in Ay-Ran.
Give it
to Hollywood to transform the most volatile of
situations into something commercial and, therefore,
profit-oriented. The unease that enclosed the long
denial of film producers to confront their nation’s
presence in Vietnam is almost absent now in this
bullish, almost eager, approach to depict the American
side of the Middle East war. Of course, the producers
will not be saying that their films will be about the
American weltanschauung. Marketing strategies giving and
taking the content of these cinemas will always remind
the viewer that, this time, the film will go to the
other side. From that part of the wall, the eye will
locate the griefs of the locals, and bring them to the
other side—onscreen—for us to talk about.
Hollywood
and its long history of overwhelming visuals can always
sit content that viewers are again generally at the
mercy of the images, more than life-size and edited to
vanquish any mind, critical or otherwise.
To siege
we add the word “surplus” as modifier for the endless
supply of films that depict the United States of
America, representing the stable but wronged worlds, and
the homogenized territories in the Middle East,
media-painted icons of terrorism and irrationality.
Against
this backdrop comes Peter Berg’s The Kingdom.
The film
is a rightful descendant of other films centering on
those territories measured by default through invasions
and attacks and reconnaissance. An ancestor of The
Kingdom is Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart,
which opened in Cannes. A story of the intrepid Wall
Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, the film focused
his widow, played by Angelina Jollie. What began as a
wise casting became inevitably its weakness, for the
film focused on the survivor of the grief instead of the
victim of brutality that is what the grief is all about.
The
project and the world-view keeps getting bigger: Robert
Redford had his Lions for Lambs, with the
producer/director starring as a university professor
whose two former students are soldiers caught in
Afghanistan. Redford is joined in the film by two huge
thespians: Tom Cruise playing a Republican senator
courting Meryl Streep, a journalist, to be on his side.
The film is about ethics in bold, brave font.
If
school and memory of that comfort zone is at the center
of Lions for Lambs, home and motherhood, as well
as fatherhood, are at the very heart of Grace is Gone.
In the Variety Screening Series available online, a
critic talks about how we are so much unprepared for a
film that shows a man widowed by war. John Cusack is
that man, the father, who opens his door one day to two
officers who ask that they be let in. As in all similar
scenes—WW II, Korean War, Vietnam War—the notice of
death is served right at the doorstep.
More
films are coming in and they are turning the camera away
from the battlefields into what is left of home and
neighborhood of the soldiers. Paul Haggis brings Tommy
Lee Jones to investigate the disappearance of his son in
In the Valley of Ellah. The character of Jones is
from the Iraq War. Ryan Philippe is also a soldier in
Stop Loss by Kimberly Pierce. His soldier comes home
and does not want ever to return to
Iraq.
These films have yet to be released and so for the
moment, we have to face the story of the war in peaceful
Saudi Arabia.
In
The
Kingdom of
Peter Berg
(who acts as Lieutenant Falco in Lions for Lambs),
home and battlefront are overlapping domains even if the
opening credits of the evolution of the relationship
between the US and Saudi look like a ponderous take on
oil and diplomacy. From that sedentary opening, we are
not, however, prepared for the gung-ho violence in this
story about the FBI going to the Middle East to
investigate the bombing of the American facility there.
As with
importation of wars, the bombing of a civilian facility
shocks because no killings of warlike proportion should
ever take place when children are out playing, and the
parents are resting, and the world seems the perfect,
well-paid place to live in. The first 20 or 30 minutes
of Berg’s adventure is terrifying because here in this
kingdom, war is waged by enemies unseen by the
Americans. The camera, however, shows us who they are
and where they are. Like the children playing out there
on a ground waiting to explode, there are also children
from atop a building being asked to look and look again
to see what will happen when those who are not part of
the fighting are killed. Then we learn the first rule:
war has no boundaries.
Jamie
Foxx, Chris Cooper and Jason Bateman form the troop lost
in the war they aim to understand. The lone woman,
Jennifer Garner, has the cheekbones and the muscle of a
young Sigourney Weaver, although she isn’t fighting
aliens in The Kingdom. She is trying to grapple
with something more unknowable, the desire of men and
women to fight each other, and kill each other.
When the
smokes have died down and more stories come from the
frontiers of Iraq and the neighboring lands, then we can
tell if what we have in this film are real feelings or,
once more, Hollywood attacking us with lies and froths.
Described by Variety as a thriller, The Kingdom
is leaving Filipino audiences breathless and panting and
entertained by all the explosions. More is lost,
however, in the silences of this film. |
