Iraq & Pollock.

I wasn't at the Hamptons International Film Festival, but I did get the chance to see two of its premieres on tape, The Situation, a grim drama set in Iraq by Philip Haas; and Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock?, a doc by Harry Moses about a woman who makes a purchase in a thrift shop of what people tell her is a painting by Jackson Pollock. Neither of these is a masterpiece - far from it. But each sheds light on its subject in a way that merits our attention.

The Situation, which refers to the mix of confusion and corruption that defines the US-led occupation of Iraq, follows Anne, a pretty blonde journalist (Connie Nielsen), as she struggles to probe the complicated ties between US intelligence and the local insurgency, while dead bodies keep piling up in the town of Samarra. The "human" side of the story is a love triangle involving Anne, her CIA agent sometime-boyfriend (Damian Lewis), and an Iraqi photographer (Mido Hamada) with whom her platonic relationship risks becoming a lot more physical. Things get even more complicated. She doesn't just lose a close friend who tries with the best of intentions to build ties between the insurgents and the Americans. She loses at love after an attack on Samarra that has the futility of Vietnam written all over it, complete with helicopters.

The film begins with an element of what looks like a subplot, but ends up as the painful truth about US attitudes toward Iraq that can't be avoided.  Two Iraqi men crossing a bridge in violation of a curfew are thrown off the side by young soldiers, who have all the charm of racist cops in the 1950s in Mississippi. One of the young men drowns. An investigation follows; the soldiers say they never harmed the men, a rogue major backs them up and things move on. For the US army, it's just another dead Arab. When Iraqis start talking about revenge, you begin to see the grudges and jealousies that divide and unite factions in the insurgency, the tribal leadership and the corrupt police. Everything that starts out badly just gets worse. It's timely, just as Bush and his advisers have abandoned "stay the course" for talk of the Iraq-isation of the war.

Shot on location in Morocco, with a production design that seems far too clean for the chaotic landscape of war, The Situation looks like a composite of film stereotypes intended to depict a place, a "situation," that's beyond being shaped or even endured under the best of intentions. We have tough young soldiers with all the attitudes of corrupt cynical cops from urban American detective films. We have a well-intentioned earnest CIA officer with some of the well-meaning awkwardness that we got in films about the Cold War and Vietnam. We also get bureaucratic villains, like a bow-tied competitive CIA underling, new to the country, whose youthful arrogance is at the level of his ignorance.

Yet the film that seems most echoed in Wendell Steavenson's script is Chinatown, the Roman Polanski/Robert Towne collaboration about a detective, finally liberated from the terminal corruption of Chinatown, who finds himself in a scandal involving wealthier participants whose relationships are just as labyrinthine and whose emotions are far more base. Our good CIA guy enters the story as he tries to pressure his military peers to install incubators for the hospitals in Samarra. It's nation-building, after all. At first, it seems logical enough. The people of Samarra fit into another film template; these are the "villagers" that have populated Hollywood films for decades, families in some exotic place just trying to live their lives, if only the US soldiers, the insurgents and the police would go away. Of course, that never happens, and more bodies pile up. And the bodies waiting to be born in the miserable town seem destined to be nothing more than part of the same mess. (A former Baathist informant makes sure you don't miss the point, trading information that will kill a man for a promise that he'll be posted at the Iraqi embassy in Sydney. He says the Foreign Ministry is run by Kurds who hate him, and Baathists just can't get a break without help from the right American.)

The parallels aren't as literal as they could be and the situation here, no pun intended, is different enough from Los Angeles of the 1930s to ensure that the audience will see something more threatening. Iraq, as it appears, in The Situation, is a poisoned landscape taken down a few more notches by the Americans who have disdain for the place that they've forgotten about building and are now occupying. Verisimilitude aside for the moment, this is a deeply anti-American film, with murderous soldiers, CIA agents who are either credulous or just nasty, and Iraqis who, however opportunistic themselves, are portrayed as victims of the United States. When the Americans invade Samarra in humvees and tanks, guess whom the audiences in the United States will be rooting for? It won't be their friends in the National Guard.

Haas and Stevenson have created a context, in which, if you follow the logic of the story, it is near-impossible to have much empathy for any of the Americans. It doesn't help that armed, uniformed, helmeted young American men seem uniformly faceless, while the Iraqis don't. It's just fiction, the filmmakers might say. In this world where cinema about "real" events is as close to that reality as most of the audience will come, it becomes the audience's reality.

And that's the point. This picture of chaos and despair is getting to be the way that most Americans view Iraq. Whatever you think of what appears to be the film's partisanship in its depiction of events on the ground in Iraq, you can't help but view The Situation, an entertainment crafted from hopelessness, as a sign of something broader - that the filmmakers think they can draw the public to a story of an un-winnable war (or an un-winnable peace), made more un-winnable by American arrogance and incompetence. They are not just making this argument, they're selling it, and the audience seems ready for that perspective on the war.

Two years ago, the view of Iraq as a hopeless place (and the image of Americans as indifferent occupiers) might have been received differently, with some disputing the unflattering depictions of soldiers. Haas's film is scheduled to be released early next year. By then, hopelessness could old news. Remember just a few years back, when the Bush White House described the invasion of Iraq as an experience that seemed a lot like winning the lottery for Iraqis. Iraq was invaded by the Americans, so it was only logical that soon would come prosperity, democracy and baseball (which soldiers taught to uncomprehending children for the cameras.)

Something like this syndrome is going on in Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock?, in which a truck-driving grandmother in Southern California has an epiphany that promises to be a lot like winning the lottery. The doc, directed and narrated by the former actor and current 60 Minutes producer Harry Moses, is something of a fable about the inevitable complications of what looks like good fortune. Teri Horton buys an abstract painting for $5 at a thrift shop, and a local art teacher tells her it looks a lot like a Pollock. Teri doesn't even know who Pollock was, and she says she thought paintings were supposed to be beautiful (which she thinks this one isn't). Yet believing is seeing, especially when money is involved, some $50 million of it if the "Pollock" is real, and her presumed good fortune snowballs into a campaign to determine whether the picture was really made by the master of abstract expressionist drip painting.

The roguish Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a doubting expert. So is Ben Heller, the dealer/collector who bought and sold Pollocks decades ago. Try expressing doubt, though, to someone who thinks she's won the lottery. Teri finds a scientist who claims that he's found Pollock's fingerprint on the back of the canvas, and a fast-talking dealer, Tod Volpe, just out of prison for an art-scam conviction, who champions the Pollock attribution and tries to put a group of investors together to buy it. (These investors are too smart for that, or at least most of them are.) The strongest believer in the picture's authenticity is Teri Horton, who didn't know Pollock from Paris Hilton when it all started. She turns down $2 million in cash, because she's convinced she's entitled to the $50 million.

The film never delivers. We never get a determination that the unsigned painting is by Pollock, and we're not told at the end of the film where the painting is. But we do see another eager American seduced by the dream of a windfall.

Tales of Americans getting rich overnight (The Beverly Hillbillies, Christmas in July, etc) are a staple of Americana and American films. Part of that myth is the notion that the recipients of good fortune come to believe that they deserve it, or that they earned it somehow. It also tells us something about art. The appreciation of Pollock's drip technique has not percolated down into the general population, but the fact that these paintings are worth many millions has. This shouldn't come as a surprise; people can read price tags better than they can analyze a work of abstract art. And why not? After all, the gambling magnate Steve Wynn, arguably the most important art collector in America, just put his elbow through a Picasso painting valued at $139 million, because Wynn is blind from retinitis pigmentosa. How does this art expert know which Pollocks to buy?

Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock? is a Picturehouse film. Perhaps we'll know more about the painting's fate when the film gets closer to release.

Posted by dwhudson at October 26, 2006 12:48 PM