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Green Zone Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: R (for violence and language) Genre: Action, Thriller Theater release: March 12, 2010 by Universal Directed by: Paul Greengrass Runtime: 1 hour 55 minutes Cast: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Amy Ryan, Brendan Gleeson, Khalid Abdalla Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Reviewing the Rob Marshall film Memoirs of a Geisha, Roger Ebert wrote, "I suspect that the more you know about Japan and movies, the less you will enjoy Memoirs of a Geisha." This is such a useful critical rule of thumb that there ought to be a shorthand way of referring to movies fitting that description. I don't suppose we can call them Geisha movies. No, probably not.

Still, let the reader understand when I suggest that Green Zone is a Geisha movie, in the sense that the more you know about Iraq, the less you will enjoy it. I don't know a lot about Iraq, and even I know too much for this movie.

Director Paul Greengrass's biggest credits include the slick, well-made escapist thrills of two Bourne sequels and the restrained docudrama realism of United 93. Green Zone is an awkward fusion of the two. The film is situated squarely not only in the war in Iraq, but in the circumstances around the case for war. It's framed as a conspiracy-minded action thriller in which real things happen, but not in the ways or for the reasons that they really happened.

Matt Damon as Roy Miller

Matt Damon is back in heroic form after playing against type in Steven Soderburgh's The Informant!, returning to the role of an unstoppable warrior off reservation on a relentless quest for the truth that corrupt higher-ups don't want him to find. Greengrass's trademark shaky-cam urgency is accentuated by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, who brought similar documentary-like rawness to The Hurt Locker.

But chief warrant officer Roy Miller (Damon) isn't on the trail of some fictional black-ops CIA organization. He's part of the 2003 U.S. effort to search for fictional weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Jason Bourne's shadowy nemesis was an agency called Treadstone; Roy Miller's is a man named Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), a Pentagon intelligence agent who seems to be the only one in the loop on where the intel is coming from. "It's actionable," Poundstone says in response to Miller's queries about the intel, meaning that Miller's team will act on it.

It's a foregone conclusion that the search for WMDs is an exercise in futility, but Miller's quest puts him on the trail of a more tangible target: the "Jack of Clubs" in the U.S. playing card schema, General al Rawi (Igal Naor), who, if you look up the actual playing card schema, is not the actual Jack of Clubs, although he seems to be a similarly built guy with a similar mustache.

I haven't read Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, Rajiv Chandrasekaran's award-winning nonfiction account of U.S. mismanagement of the attempted reconstruction of Iraq, supposedly the inspiration for the film. From Charles Ferguson's documentary No End in Sight I vaguely recognized some of the mistakes made by civilian authorities in Green Zone: insular thinking; excluding other points of view (e.g., Brendan Gleeson's frustrated CIA analyst); shutting out former Ba'ath party leaders; shutting down all existing Iraqi military forces. A subplot involving Amy Ryan as a Wall Street Journal reporter named Lawrie Dayne whose bungled reporting on WMDs helped to make the case for war sounded familiar.

Greg Kinnear as Clark Poundstone, Any Ryan as Lawrie Dayne

After seeing the film, I refreshed myself on some of the details. The real players—L. Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority who actually made the controversial decisions depicted in the film; New York Times journalist Judith Miller, who actually wrote the problematic WMD stories; Ahmed Chalabi, the U.S.-backed Iraqi politician who boasted about falsifying Western intelligence—are replaced by fictitious stand-ins who diverge from their real-world counterparts in significant ways.

As for Miller, there's simply no real-world basis for his role in the Iraqi conflict. By the end he's become a whistle-blower like Marine captain Brian Steidle in The Devil Came on Horseback, a documentary about Darfur. It's tidy, comforting revisionism, like sending Rambo back into Vietnam so we can win this time. Instead of a morass in which the search for WMDs simply peters out, we get the closure of a smoking gun, a scapegoat whom Miller can buttonhole with righteous fury like Harrison Ford lacing into the president at the end of Clear and Present Danger.

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