Tribeca Review: 'The War Tapes'

The project started when the New Hampshire National Guard offered Scranton (a longtime television news producer) the chance to embed with a unit deploying for Iraq. Scranton asked if she could embed cameras instead. Each of the 180 soldiers in the selected regiment were offered the chance to participate in the project (and, by proxy, to get a crash course in filmmaking for free); ten volunteered, and three were featured in the final project. Scranton sent her crew small DV cameras, and kept in near-constant contact with them via instant messages, giving them tips on shooting concepts and techniques, and talking them through the process of telling the stories of their lives. In turn, the soldiers kept journals, and kept the cameras mounted on their Humvees, capturing everything from car bombs to commissary politics.

The three men featured in the film manage to seem to represent a cross-section of the US military, without ever individually feeling like archetypes. Mike Moriarty is a thirty-something husband and father to two kids; he joined the Guard in a potentially questionable effort to balance out a bout of post-9/11 depression, and though he generally supports both the War and President Bush, he's disillusioned by the lack of progress he sees in Iraq. Steve Pink is a poetry-writing jock who signed up in order to pay for college, and can't get out of Iraq fast enough. "I should really thank God for saving my lucky ass," he writes in his journal. "I’ll do that. Then I’m gonna jerk off." Zack Bazzi, a 24-year-old Lebanese-American veteran of conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, is just as cynical about what we're doing in Iraq, but far less agitated about it. "Let’s just leave it alone and leave. Fuck the oil man ... I’ll walk everywhere in the US. I’ll recycle everything, damn it. I’ll even drive a Honda Insight." As he high-fives and chats in Arabic with the Iraqi teens who line the streets selling cigarettes and porn, his combat brothers watch from the Humvee, calling him a traitor and a spy.

Despite their differences, each soldier must deal with increasingly crippling disillusion over the fact that each is a pawn in a conflict that they cannot control. The insurgents, we see, are doing most of their damage by way of Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs -- basically, makeshift bombs, sometimes housed within cars, that can go off anywhere or anytime with no warning. The War Tapes is not about the level of the military that attempts to seek out the planters of such devices to prevent (or punish) attacks; when a bomb goes off, it's generally Bazzi, Moriarty, and/or Pink's jobs to drive towards the explosion and clean it up. It's essentially the most dangerous, and most depressing, janitorial job of all time, and it naturally leads to cynicism. At one point, Moriarty asks his Humvee partner what he thinks of Iraq's then-new status as a sovereign nation. The other soldier perfectly parrots the party line about liberation and stability in the region ... and then when Moriarty prompts him to "tell me how you really feel", he says, "Then after that happens maybe we can buy everybody in the world a puppy. "

When not gathering bloody limbs from the roadside, the boys spend large parts of the days acting as security escorts for supply convoys. Essentially, they're traffic cops with big guns -- except, as Bazzi points out, the average city's police force usually does not have the advantage of having "zero training about the culture." The supply convoys are run, like all of the industry surrounding our military in Iraq, by Kellogg, Brown and Root, AKA Halliburton, about whom nobody has anything positive to say. Regardless of their respective political positions, each soldier's personal outlook on the war stands in refutation of the administration's claim that there's positive stuff going on that the media doesn't show, and much of the controllable negative comes directly from Halliburton. We learn that the agency, in which Vice President Cheney has a controlling stake, is gouging our military at every turn, charging the army upwards of $25 per mess hall Styrofoam plate, amongst other crimes.

Adding up the evidence available to them, some of the soldiers have started to think that the administration is dragging out to conflict in order to maximize their personal profits. Moriarty all but suggests that if our leaders really wanted to end this conflict, they'd be "nuking this fucking country" -- or, at the very least, "Shit or get off the pot." In one of the films most stunningly unscripted moments, Steve, back on Cape Cod after a year of duty and clearly rattled with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, stares straight at the camera and asks, "Why the fuck are we there?" The camera holds on him as he continues, his passion and volume progressively heading upwards. "You don’t put 150,000 troops from all over the country in there and say we’re there to create democracy. We’re there to create money, you know?" He takes a swig of beer and, eyes steely, finished the thought. "Somebody other than Dick Cheney better be getting their hands on it pretty soon."

Perhaps contrary to appearances, The War Tapes is not a blatant piece of liberal propaganda. Scranton gives equal time and space to the soldiers' deeply felt patriotism, as well as their empirical dissent. She also looks into how their service affects the women in their lives that they've left behind. Still, it would seem natural that some will walk away from the film energized by the passionate arguments it presents against the current war, whilst others will respond with rage to the very same. Regardless of your political bent, I think we can all agree that no film has ever taken such a direct interest in what "our boys" think and feel. The production values make The War Tapes feel less like a work of art than a work of activism, but that's hardly a complaint. With television news no longer willing and able to perform the kind of public service that helped get us out of Vietnam, The War Tapes is exactly the kind of activism we need.