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thedrifter
08-24-07, 06:39 AM
movie review
Iraq documentary lays bare the war's strategic hubris
*** RATING
By Lisa Kennedy Denver Post Film Critic
The Denver Post
Article Last Updated:08/23/2007 09:14:30 PM MDT


Bring a plastic bag with you to "No End in Sight," opening today at the Chez Artiste.

Then you can make a Locks of Love donation with the hair you tear out watching Charles Ferguson's measured, disheartening documentary about the ongoing war in Iraq.

Readers of newspapers and books, as well as filmgoers who have taken the time to see the growing number of indie documentaries about the Iraq war, are not likely to be startled by the assertions of the diverse and impressive array of participant-observers who sat down with the filmmaker.

Yet the movie's cumulative effect riles, galls and confounds.

"No End in Sight" makes a sobering case for the notion that early missteps in the occupation have fed hostilities that render a satisfying resolution nearly impossible.

Ferguson intercuts provocative interviews with military advisers, journalists, analysts and Marines with news footage of war-scarred neighborhoods, familiar press conferences and congressional hearings.

The parade of wonking, talking heads is meant to deflect knee-jerk criticisms of ideological ax-grinding. Some of the most credible interviewees: former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; former Ambassor Barbara Bodine; retired Gen. Jay Garner; Marine Lt. Seth Moulton; and Colin Powell's chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson.

Don't expect momentary comedic flashes or cinematic sizzle here. Ferguson's methodical, quietly aesthetic approach declares the stakes are too high for filmmaking pyrotechnics or self-aggrandizing tricks.

And, of course, they are.

Occasionally, the director can be heard asking a question or follow-up from nearby. But his curiosity is ours.

When someone says the hard-to-believe, he queries them further. He does this verifying more than once with Walter Slocombe, who was senior adviser for the Coalition Provisional Authority. With Ambassador L. Paul Bremer at the head, the authority replaced the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in late spring 2003.

While his former boss refused to be interviewed for the movie, Slocombe sits in the hottest of seats.

"No End in Sight" doesn't belabor the run-up to the war. "How did we get there in the first place" quandaries - a.k.a. the weapons of mass destruction debacle - take a back seat to an investigation of the reasons the Bush administration seemed so unprepared to actually occupy and stabilize a nation of 27 million.

Campbell Scott provides the movie's intermittent narration. More and more, documentarians are forgoing the omniscient voice-over, letting the interviews shape the film's overall narrative.

While Scott's interventions prove helpful chronologically, one wishes Ferguson had been able to dispense altogether with this narration, as well.

Scott is not the problem. He delivers his lines with flat neutrality. But Ferguson's script has him too often intoning the film's most troublesome arguments. For instance, Scott is left to say again and again that none of the war's masterminds - from President Bush to Vice President Cheney to Donald Rumsfeld to Paul Wolfowitz to Condoleezza Rice - had any credible military experience.

Yes, Rumsfeld flew a jet in the Navy, but not during wartime, the movie asserts.

The absence of battlefield bona fides is true. But the repetition of that fact seems to argue the point that given their lack of wartime experience, none of these people had the skills needed to engage or manage a war.

This is one of the movie's more flimsy - and dangerous - assertions. Archival clips of the former secretary of defense conducting press conferences make a more persuasive argument about what was sorely lacking in the Bush administration: strategic humility.

Most striking is the unwillingness to stray from theory once it proved insufficient for the on-the-ground realities. This type of hubris is not particular to one political party, nor to one type of leader.

"No End in Sight" makes one thing clear: Were it not so bloody, the war in Iraq would be destined to become a case study in the nation's business schools.

It is a graduate level course in organizational mismanagement.


"No End in Sight"

NOT RATED | 1 hour, 42 minutes | WAR DOCUMENTARY | Written and directed by Charles Ferguson; photography by Antonio Rossi; featuring Richard Armitage, Barbara Bodine, Gen. Jay Garner, Marine Lt. Seth Moulton, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Walter Slocombe, Samantha Power, Aida Ussayran and Col. Paul Hughes. | Opens today at the Chez Artiste.

Ellie