Press

Newsday.com
02 February 2007
BY GENE SEYMOUR
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Fictional Iraq war plays like the real thing

“The Situation” is a bit of a mess. But this fictional treatment of the Iraq war is nowhere near as messy as what it keeps labeling “the situation.” The characters’ repeated use of this euphemism, whether they’re American or Iraqi, Sunnis or Christians, suggests nothing so much as a consensus exasperation with any attempt to characterize the war in any concrete way.

Audiences expecting this film to wring any kind of order from the ongoing chaos may find that “The Situation” merely reflects this “situation’s” rat’s-nest confusion and seeming hopelessness. Which may be exactly what director Philip Haas and screenwriter Wendell Steavenson (who reported from the war’s front lines for Slate.com) wish to evoke in this story of a correspondent (Connie Nielsen) struggling to find truth and make sense amid the moral and physical ruins.

Nielsen’s character, Anna, starts out stuck in traffic with waves of Iraqis outside Samarra, where it’s been rumored that a group of American soldiers detained a pair of unarmed Iraqi teenagers after curfew and tossed both into the Tigris River; one swam to shore, the other drowned. If both she and the movie lose their tether to this incident (drawn from a 2004 event), it’s due in part to the shape-shifting nature of allegiances - and of perception itself, especially when one tries to figure out who’s doing what to whom.

In other words, you have policemen who are thugs-for-sale, insurgents who seem in it for the violence more than whatever cause they’re serving and desperate people at all levels of society, looking out for themselves; for instance, a diplomat (Mahmoud El Lozy), who oozes charm and help to the Americans because he hopes they’ll get him and his family shipped to a cozy post in Australia.

Others aren’t so lucky, including a source of Anna’s who is tricked into an ambush. Anna’s also worried about the safety of her friend Zaid (Mido Hamada), an Iraqi freelance photographer whose Christian family is so disgusted by the prevailing chaos that they wonder whether they weren’t safer under Saddam Hussein. The Americans, for all their bravado, seem to be on comparably shaky ground, even Anna’s sometime lover, Dan (Damien Lewis), a U.S. Embassy employee, who struggles to keep the focus on the mission, while privately wondering what that mission is.

Haas, best known for such literary adaptations as 1993’s “The Music of Chance” and 1995’s “Angels and Insects,” aims to bring both Graham Greene-style moodiness and gritty intimacy to a war whose real-life scope and shape seems to expand every day. This may seem insubstantial at best to those seeking the kind of urgency and breadth of the best Iraq war documentaries of the past year. But “The Situation’s” vision, however static and misty it may get at times, may someday be regarded as a window to broader perspective on a “situation” that may now be too convulsive and infuriating to contemplate deeply.