Written by: Wendell Steavenson
Directed by: Philip Haas
Starring: Connie Nielsen, Damian Lewis, Mido Hamada
Good job, America!
On November 7th, you—the populace of this great nation—mobbed polling places in record numbers, and restored my faith in your intelligence and awareness. Obviously, you’re tired of the runaround you’ve been getting over the past six years from the Fearless Leaders up at the White House. And you should be.
If you’d like to reassure yourselves and confirm the soundness of the choices you made, I could recommend a few books. But since we’re here, how ‘bout a film? The Situation is an accessible one to start with. Philip Haas (The Music Of Chance, Up At The Villa, and, one of my all-time faves ever, Angels & Insects) has created a down-and-dirty, in-the-trenches picture of what folks are living (and, mostly, dying) with in Iraq…a place that can barely be called a country anymore. Iraq has been reduced to a “situation,” in the truest sense of the word. But a picture’s worth a thousand words, so check out this movie. You really should.
Haas, who was interested in developing a film about Iraq, read a piece in Granta Magazine by Wendell Steavenson, a journalist who spent a year over there covering the war. After conferencing with Haas about the topic, Steavenson was soon penning a very competent screenplay (her first). The story, roughly autobiographical, revolves tangentially around Anna, an American journalist played passionately by Connie Nielsen (Gladiator, The Ice Harvest, and most recently, “Law & Order: SVU”) and the love triangle she shares with Dan, a CIA official (Damian Lewis) and Zaid, (Mido Hamada), an Iraqi photojournalist (based loosely on Steavenson’s real-life boyfriend.)
The drama begins when a posse of U.S. soldiers throw two Iraqi teenagers off a bridge, and one of them dies, spurring an investigation. The incident ignites the already seething tensions within the local community. Complicating matters further is Anna’s close relationship with one of her sources, a community leader.
Weaving in and out of the developing controversy are the machinations of competing warlords. You may quickly find them sadly reminiscent of our favorite HBO mobsters—except they’re way less lovable, plus the Iraqi gangstas get to wreak havoc with their vigilante politics pretty much unchecked by any government authority.
Though the American military methods depicted here are not always what we’d hope, the film is not so much a condemnation of the troops themselves, as it is an account of the consequences resulting from the complete lack of competent and cohesive leadership on our end, and our government’s dearth of a clear-cut policy for what’s happening over there. In American bureaucratic circles, one hand doesn’t seem to know what the other is doing. Wendell’s story gives us a vivid taste of the mess, the “situation” that was once a sovereign country. (OK, a murderous despot ruled it, but at least they had working lights and plumbing back then.) Performances are spot-on, and Hamada’s Iraqi photographer is particularly poignant when he muses about his beleaguered homeland, and expresses his wish to fly off one day to cooler climes (and, perhaps, a day free from the overwhelming presence of death).
The love triangle part of the plot wears a little thin, but it pays off when we follow Anna into the treacherous morass of local Islamic factions, and their cozy little methods for creating equilibrium between opposing tensions. Then we get the message loud and clear—while buzzwords like “democracy” and “freedom” make us feel all warm and fuzzy, the people of this ancient and distant culture ain’t nothin’ like us. And right now, as a consequence of the “situation” they’re forced to live with, they have yet to be convinced to rush out and change their traditions any time soon.
Look for The Situation’s theatrical release in February of 2007.
