The "Green Zone" Fails to Get the Green Light

Despite great action scenes, this potentially fascinating look at the Iraq war is spoiled by weak story elements and almost no character development. Matt Damon once again manages to catch me up in his great grasp of character and I love him in this film. Green Zone is a look at the early days following the “Shock and Awe” blitzkrieg of G.W. Bush’s war. Like George Senior’s war, there were almost no casualties, but unlike his father, George W. couldn’t walk away and there were weapons of mass destruction to find. The problem – he couldn’t find them. No one in Green Zone seems to be able to find any either. Green Zone’s take… there were no WMDs and the U.S. government, or at least a few elements, knew it.

What Green Zone does well is not blame President George W. Bush; but instead – and it’s probably closer to the truth if history is any indication – blames certain elements in his administration and their eagerness for this war. Like the Iran-Contra and the Watergate affairs, sometimes “plausible deniability” causes underlings to take initiative when they should not. I found the film's perspective very clever, somewhat revelatory and logical. Green Zone illustrates quite well the disconnect in a bureaucracy dedicated to its own preservation and the preservation of its leader.

The plot of Green Zone is simple: members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party met with senior security personnel in the Bush administration to inform them of the destruction of Saddam’s WMDs and beg for a position in the new Iraq. Whew! Only the security staff, faced with the denial by one of Saddam Hussein’s principal leaders, felt that the war was too important and Bush’s commitment too strong to walk away; hence the Iraq War and Bush’s eventual fall from grace. I love this plot and the logical, thoughtful development of the politics behind it. What I don’t love is the implementation.

Green Zone tends to the mysterious, and it should not. There is a great reason to “humanize” the enemy in this film to help the audience understand. The Iraqis were not the zealots (Muslim extremists) we see in the news. Instead, they tended to the pragmatic. Even at the top levels of Saddam’s government, they managed to survive through practicality. In Green Zone, the “Jack of Clubs,” Republican Guard Chief of Staff Al-Rawi, was purportedly the key to the entire Iraqi conflict; and had his information been revealed, there would have been no war. I think knowing more about Al-Rawi and his presumed motivation would have made Green Zone a far more fascinating and successful film. Unfortunately, there was too much focus on action and too little on underlying story or character.

In fact, there was little focus on character background or motivation at all, even in the principal characters. One of the selling points of the recent Oscar winning The Hurt Locker was its look into the background of the protagonist, its exploration of why he needed near death experiences. Green Zone leaves that to speculation and that’s the main downside to the film. Green Zone is trying for political commentary and action and falls far short because of this lack of "why." There is just not enough depth.

Finally, the acting. Matt Damon was his usual brilliant self but Greg Kinnear, as Bush security advisor Clark Poundstone, seemed just a little too slick. Kinnear, one my favorites, has done some good work (As Good as it Gets for example) but this is not it. Another of my favorite character actors, Brendan Gleeson, as  the CIA's Middle Eastern expert Martin Brown,  seemed a little too frazzled and out of control to be a proper foil to Kinnear’s character. The CIA shouldn't be that overdone by a bureaucrat, even one as sharp as Poundstone is supposed to be. For a major spook, particularly a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs, the interdepartmental disagreement should have been constant and expected. Brown just didn’t seem to have a grasp of the situation and left me thinking that Gleeson misread the character. Further, Gleeson and Kinnear had no life outside their roles, leaving the audience to speculate and their characters one dimensional. In fact, no character but Damon’s was more than just one dimensional and that’s the reaper’s kiss for a movie: weak characters.

I would still give Green Zone a

disappointing 3 stars out of 5 for great action and a pretty good plot.