Hollywood takes on the Iraq war.

In a curmudge only postmortem on the 2007 Toronto Film Festival, Variety's chief film critic Todd McCarthy dismissed the current spate of "Iraq-centered fiction films" as "underwhelming" projects that reflect "the safest, least provocative attitude it is possible to have--the war sucks, Bush sucks, America is down the tubes." McCarthy concludes--not unreasonably--that documentary films are "much better equipped" to handle the historical and political complexities of a conflict that eludes the simplistic melodramatic contours of many Hollywood narratives.

While it's true that most of the recent fiction films inspired by the Iraq conflagration and the ongoing "War on Terror" are far from masterpieces (and are also, perhaps predictably, tanking at the box office), McCarthy's blithe assertion that "nothing new" can be learned from them seems myopic and misguided. For while fundamentally new insights may be absent in the bogus seriousness of Peter Berg's ludicrous thriller, The Kingdom--not to mention well-intentioned, but frequently clumsy films such as Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, and Badland--they all shed genuine light on the state of the American psyche. The Kingdom is perhaps the easiest of the films to dissect--this farfetched tale of an FBI unit dispatched to obliterate a terrorist cell in Saudi Arabia is a barely disguised wish-fulfillment fantasy. In the wake of grim assessments of the Iraq war in books such as Hubris and Fiasco, Hollywood has decided to rectify historical myopia by focusing its energies on the country that gave us the majority of the 9/11 hijackers.

Most of the other Iraq-related films that are gradually wending their ways into cinemas are less preoccupied with macho derring-do than with inventorying the collateral damage of the war on both our civil liberties and the American family unit. In her new book, The Terror Dream, feminist commentator Susan Faludi claims that, during the post 9/11 years, the Bush Administration ushered in a retrograde ethos that promoted "traditional" notions of marriage and maternity while enshrining age-old assumptions of female frailty. Ironically enough, despite their shortcomings, many of the recent Iraq war movies undermine the resurgent male triumphalism that Faludi assails. Badland's protagonist, a battle-scarred, despondent veteran whose alienation culminates in acute psychosis, is the antithesis of the confident, swaggering male celebrated by the media during the aftermath of 9/11. The anguished father played by Tommy Lee Jones in In the Valley of Elah--haunted by the atrocities witnessed by his murdered son in Iraq--always seems on the verge of tears. A Vietnam veteran himself and always a staunch supporter of the military, the Jones character personifies the huge number of conservative Americans who have come to see this country's intervention in Iraq as morally bankrupt.

Unfortunately, many of the newly released Iraq war dramas view threats to the primacy of the American nuclear family (often a preoccupation of Hollywood melodrama) as more important than the misguided imperial hubris that catapulted the United States into Iraq in the first place. Even Gavin Hood's Rendition, which condemns "extra-ordinary rendition," one of the most shocking--and shockingly ineffectual--aspects of the government's "war on terror," appears primarily outraged by government malfeasance because it disrupts the tranquil suburban existence of the heroine played by Reese Witherspoon. Witherspoon's Egyptian-born husband, a mild-mannered chemical engineer, is kidnapped by the CIA on suspicion of being a dangerous terrorist and, like the victims of lynch mobs in Hollywood films of the Thirties, is as innocent as a lamb. By depicting the administration's inept antiterrorism strategies as an assault on hearth and home, Hood manages to simultaneously trivialize the excesses of antiterrorist zeal and strain dramatic credulity.

McCarthy gives short shrift to two more complex and nuanced films--Brian De Palma's Redacted and Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha. While both films are resolutely antiwar, they are as much about the obfuscations of the media as the war itself. Redacted explores the paradoxes of a world in which, despite the contemporary mediascape that boasts innumerable new sources of information, the truth about Iraq continues to be distorted, censored, and suppressed. De Palma's viscerally disturbing fictionalization of an actual brutal rape and murder of a young Iraqi woman by American soldiers is consequently filtered through a host of filters--media blogs, home DV movies, and ersatz documentary footage that demonstrate the elusiveness of the very concept of truth within a political landscape where reality is controlled and manufactured on a daily basis.

In an interview with De Palma in this issue, the director expresses a salutary rage towards a government that has encouraged amoral behavior under the aegis of a noble cause. The fact that De Palma's producer has in turn blacked out, and in effect "redacted," the faces of Iraqi corpses in the film's final shot provides an ironic gloss on the often in tractable efforts of filmmakers to break through the wall of silence that surrounds "controversial" subjects in the American media.

Broomfield's Battle for Haditha is seemingly more straightforward. This meticulous recreation of a massacre of twenty-four people (including many women and children) committed by a convoy of U.S. Marines as an apparent "retaliation" for a terrorist attack unfolds like a cinema-verite film. Yet, given Broomfield's experience as a documentary filmmaker, and his close working relationship with actual Marines who were encouraged to improvise their dialog, the viewer has an awareness of shocking immediacy that is nevertheless mediated by a directorial intelligence that is cognizant of the ways in which reality becomes transformed in both fiction and nonfiction cinema.

As a magazine devoted to both the art and politics of the cinema, Cineaste has never merely promoted films because their hearts were in the right place. While keeping in mind our commitment to both high esthetic standards and political acumen, we believe, unlike McCarthy, that it is quite possible to make fiction films on vital contemporary crises such as the Iraq War that are as artistically compelling as they are politically courageous. Although filmmakers taking on the morass in Iraq may not have yet produced anything comparable with Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion or Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, De Palma and Broomfield's recent efforts are certainly steps in the right direction.--The Editors