Ray Pride

"I refuse to be intimidated by reality anymore. After all, what is reality anyway? Nothin' but a collective hunch. I made some studies: Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it."

Sound like anyone you know? No, it's not a reference to any unreality-based politician: it's out of the mouth of Trudy, Lily Tomlin's bag-lady character from "The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe." Trudy's lines rang in my head for a couple days after watching Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's "Gunner Palace," an on-the-ground report drawn from two visits to Baghdad, following the day-in-day-out routines of the 400 frighteningly young soldiers of the 2-3 Field Artillery Battalion (aka the Gunners), stationed in Uday Hussein's opulent former pleasure dome, complete with swimming pool, bombed out during the "Shock and Awe" prelude to the U.S. occupation.

"Gunner Palace" is a text as ready for adoption and creative misappropriation as any movie since "Forrest Gump." Right? Left? Pro-war? Anti-war? Ken Tucker, New York magazine's former TV critic, now film critic, trashed the movie in the most myopic fashion when it opened in New York City last weekend, for not being the movie he would have made. His stomach-churning lead? "Watching `Gunner Palace,' I initially wondered whether the filmmakers, Michael Tucker... and Petra Epperlein, were like the people who used to spit on Vietnam veterans when they returned home." Were there "people who use to spit on Vietnam veterans"? Ken Tucker sounds so blasé about this disputed contention, let alone what is shown on screen in the film up for review. But Tony Scott of the New York Times saw a movie closer to reality, the real world, the movie at hand: "In refusing to generalize or to judge, `Gunner Palace' opens itself up to varying interpretations, all of them likely to be colored by the interpreter's prior opinions about the war. The soldiers'... efficient brutality with which they break into Iraqi homes in their hunt for `bad guys,' may suggest a prelude to the abuse at Abu Ghraib (which is where, we are told, many of those arrested will go)."

Yes: it's about the fray. "For y'all this is just a show, but we live in this movie," one of the verbal, often profane young soldiers says. You bring your own ideas about war and the representation of it. Some will venture that "Gunner Palace" is "COPS" writ large, "Grand Theft Auto" in the middle of the streets of Baghdad, "Black Hawk Down" in real time, but that's the same type of soft-headed mush as saying the events of 9/11 unfolded "just like a disaster movie!" Tucker observes. Doesn't judge. Offers witness, not history's long view, not the haircut-with-a-microphone intoning on the evening news. There are the jaded older military bureaucrats, but most of the faces are kids in a crazy war, their boisterous, vivid youth: the military's in loco parentis and the kids are not all right. Generous, confounding, suggestive, elating and nightmarish, "Gunner Palace" is a vitally important piece of work.

"There's a hunger out there for perspective," Tucker told me in an email last fall, before its appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival and its acquisition by Palm Pictures. "Fahrenheit 9/11" was still throwing off heat. "In this heated political season, where you can't turn on the TV or go online without seeing [Moore's] face, it seems that the very idea of what a documentary is has mutated," Tucker wrote. "I haven't seen his film. No doubt it is good entertainment, no doubt provocative. But is it documentary? Most interestingly, in the context of the Iraq war, is that Moore hasn't even been to Iraq. He's filtering secondhand footage. He doesn't have a personal reference for what the audience is seeing."

Living in Berlin, Tucker hadn't seen Jehane Noujaim's "Control Room" at that point, either, "but I'm sure it allows the audience to take a trip to with the filmmaker to a world that was previously unknown. I'm sure it allows the audience to make up their own minds, about a subject that is very complex. I've tried to do the same. From my first trip to Iraq, I sensed that I could tell a story about young soldiers at war from their perspective--if I just freed myself from making judgments."

Tucker found a mindset for that: "I tried hard to be the guy that `just pushes the red button.' It was relatively easy while shooting to do that." But, he noted, "returning to the `world,' you find that people expect something different. If the reality you have captured doesn't conform to the prevailing perception of that reality, then you feel almost obliged to give in. A while back, I sought out a few known filmmakers to ask their opinions about this dilemma. Albert Maysles told me to forge ahead, to stay true. Jack Laurence, who shot `The World of Charlie Company' in Vietnam, led me to a story about his filmmaking experience. He wanted to stay true to the soldiers, their experience. Once while doing a standup in front of a platoon, his cameraman turned to the soldiers and asked them if they thought `what he is saying is true.' The answer was yes. When I returned to Baghdad the fourth time last February [2004], I made a similar test. Warts and all, I put a DVD in a laptop and dragged it around to hooches to get comments. I wanted to know if I had stayed true. The answer was `yes.' There are many things in this film that will make people uncomfortable. The soldiers know that. As one young soldier-poet says in `Gunner Palace,' `You may not like this, but please respect it.'"

"Gunner Palace" opens Friday. You can read Tucker's diary of the making of the film at gunnerpalace.com.

(2005-03-08)

Also by Ray Pride

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