Gunner Palace: The Real Iraq War Movie

The Hot Button ^ | July 7, 2004 | David Poland

[TerryGale]

July 7, 2004

"If you know any politicians be sure to let them know that while they're sitting around their dinner tables with their families talking about how hard the war is on them, we're here under attack nearly 24 hours a day, dodging RPGs and fighting not just for a better Iraq, but just to stay alive" ........................ Stuart Wilf - April 10, 2004

So ends the first truly great document of the Iraqi War, Mike Tucker's new film, Gunner Palace. It speaks to the war as Tucker wants it to? through the voices of one of the two groups of true combatants, the American soldiers.

Tucker spent two months with the 2/3 Field Artillery aka The Gunner Battalion, who are housed in and operate out of one of Uday Hussein's "weekend party palaces" in Baghdad. Gunfire on one side of the wall? a big blue swimming pool and an ice tea (liquor has recently been banned while swimming) on the other. And four months after the end of "major combat," the 2/3 faces a world not their own, day after day, week after week, through their year-long tours of duty.

The second thing you notice about Gunner Palace, after the quick leap into fighting and absurdity, is the beauty of the images. This looks like a studio feature, even though it is a legit documentary. It is, for all intents and purposes, a Robert Altman movie? except it is 100% real. The elements of all the great war satires is there. Altman's M*A*S*H, Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket and David O. Russell's Three Kings are certainly there. You can almost hear Radar O'Reilly making announcements, see Hawkeye teeing off and feel the self-doubt of men of healing forced to be part of the destruction. Three Kings' understanding that even in war zones, men are just men and behaviors are challenged by morality, even when morality seems in short supply. The second half of Full Metal Jacket, which focuses on urban warfare, turns out to be even closer to truth than we could have imagined. The resonance of the "go to new places and be the first kid on the block to get a confirmed kill" gag that was well worn even when Kubrick used it? and there is a dark power to hearing a soldier recycle it again, as though he was offering it too us for the very first time. The movie also carries some of the poetic feel (though not the actual poetic voiceovers or animal-driven allegory) of Malick's non-satiric The Thin Red Line.

But what is breathtaking about the movie is that in sequence after sequence, we get a view of life in wartime? little stories, well told? that we haven't seen before. Tucker doesn't linger on them. There is not the consistency of narrative that a Michael Moore offers in Fahrenheit 9/11. But then again, while Tucker seems to share the direction of Moore's politics, he has the courage of his conviction and in his effort, shows a real belief in the power of human beings to experience art for themselves and to come up with the right answer that will let them sleep at night. He understands that absurdity does not need a bright light flashed on and that the participants in the absurdity don't need dunce caps put on their heads in order for the audience and those participants to understand the absurdity.

It is, essentially, impossible in this day and age to make a film that looks at the reality of war that is pro-war. Surely, you can still make a jingoistic tale with inhuman "bad guys" in a war zone and great "good guys." But there is little good about war by the nature of the beast. And as I have written before, the notion that by not being dogmatic about attacking the media villains of a war, a person or a film becomes a supporter of that villainy is horrifying.

Gunner Palace is not politics. It is not an opinion about war. It is war. It is men and women living in war. It is a beating heart.

If there is a single documentary that you have to see about the war, it's an easy call? this is the one. There are others worth seeing, but this is yours.

I don't expect that Gunner Palace can be the kind of phenomenon that Fahrenheit 9/11 is. Tucker isn't willing, it seems, to pay the price of relentless self-promotion and spin that Michael Moore has paid to make his film a cultural event. But this movie must be seen in this election year before November if Americans are to have a real understanding of what our soldiers are experiencing in Iraq. And unlike Moore's polemic, Tucker's film really is about these soldiers. There are no crying parents, suffering their losses. That is too easy. That is the "a conservative is a liberal whose been mugged" argument? true, but obvious and not moral. Tucker forces you, as the viewer, to deal with your sense of loss? and equally, your inability to connect the name of one dead soldier, at times, to the parade of human beings who are part of this ongoing drama.

There are those who would see Gunner Palace take the traditional route of indie distribution through the festival circuit and hopefully, into theaters next year. But that is not good enough for this extraordinary experience. Someone at some studio must step up and bring the film out no later than September. There is definitely money to be made here. But far more importantly, it is a chance for Americans to be a lot more responsible in self-educating before we got to the polls in November. It is, for a change, a true public service.

To read more about the film, go to http://www.gunnerpalace.com.

[TerryGale]

The only question is, will this movie find a studio to distribute it to theaters?

[Khurkris]

bump - ping

[martin_fierro]

I gotta wonder where this author is coming from.

Robert Altman is commie trash. And we all know about Michael Moore.

The author cites both approvingly.

[bboop]

My question -- is it anti-war, then, and anti-Bush? Great, yet another...

[Khurkris]

"But then again, while Tucker seems to share the direction of Moore's politics, he has the courage of his conviction and in his effort, shows a real belief in the power of human beings to experience art for themselves and to come up with the right answer that will let them sleep at night."

That could be the case.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

It is, essentially, impossible in this day and age to make a film that looks at the reality of war that is pro-war.

True. It is however possible to make a film that looks at war and calls it peace. A film which shows Iraq as an idyl of bliss even as Saddam and his sons proceed apace to fill mass graves off camera.

It is impossible to make a film that looks at the reality of war that is pro-war. The Longest Day showed a great many American casualties, for example, and each one of those images is a testament to horror.

The irony is that an "anti war" director didn't think that the actual horror was sufficient; he had to add in a fiction at the end to the effect that the scaling of the cliffs had been in vain because there were no guns at the place which had been breifed as the objective.

That half-truth was a lie - in that the guns did in fact exist, were in fact nearby to the briefed objective, and were in fact knocked out by men who had scaled the cliffs.

[STFrancis]

Check out the website... I think he really "tried" to make a documentary vs. propaganda. Also left out a lot of footage that would have been to easy to exploit. Sounds like a true war documentary to me...??!!

[TerryGale]

Go to http://www.gunnerpalace.com to see what the author has to say about the film. From what I can tell from the author's article, the documentary focuses on the unit he is embedded with. I was more impress by www.gunnerpalace.com than by The Hot Button article actually.

[TigersEye]

bump to read later