Toronto Dispatch. 7.

Was 2007 the year of revenge at the Toronto International Film Festival?

In Battle for Haditha, a film that has not been given its due, at least not yet, a crew of Marines in that city north of Baghdad turn from frat boys into killers overnight after one of their sergeants is killed by an Improvised Explosive Device (IED). A total of 24 Iraqis are killed in a reprisal by the Americans. Five Marines are on trial for those murders. Three of those Marines have already been cleared.

Director Nick Broomfield tries to look at the events from all sides - through the eyes of American kids from poor backgrounds who are under-trained for the jobs that they are being asked to perform, from the point of view of ex-Baathist soldiers from the disbanded army who plant the IED for Al Qaeda fighters in exchange for $1000, and through the eyes of a family whose house is taken over by the bombers as a vantage point from which they can observe and videotape the explosion that destroys a US Humvee.

The American boys were acting out of revenge. They have said as much in interviews, after Time Magazine revealed that the official US report saying that the victims all died in an IED explosion were false. Broomfield has said that he wanted to show the perspective of the young soldiers. It doesn't win them much sympathy, but it does bring plenty of realism to his film about one of the worst massacres of the war committed by US troops. Let's not forget that revenge for the attack of September 11 got us into this war in the first place. Bear in mind, too, that none other than Bush himself said that one of the reasons for invading Iraq was to go after "the man who tried to kill my Dad."

The other element of revenge comes from the ex-Baathist soldiers who plant the IED. The Americans dissolved the Iraqi Army, a stupid mistake that Bush is now trying to blame on some underlings. The bombing was the revenge of the little guys in need of cash.

Broomfield has a feel for circumstances that drive people toward killing, and as a filmmaker, he can tell a compelling story about how that can happen. He also has a way of getting convincing performances out of actors - not what you would expect from a guy who normally makes documentaries.

It's not the first time. Broomfield's Ghosts, about Chinese harvesters of cockles on tidal flats in England, is as grim as an immigration story gets. In case you don't remember it, the true story on which Ghosts was based involved Chinese workers who were beaten by English work crews and forced to work at night in a place where the tides are life-threatening - and sure enough, all but a few of the workers were lost in the rising waters. This was a tremendous scandal in Britain, but scenes in Ghosts set in employment agencies suggest that not much is likely to change. The Chinese are desperate to find work and willing to work for low wages, while British employers are all too happy to underpay them. Don't look for justice there.

Back, briefly, to the topic of revenge since The Brave One is the #1 movie in the US at the moment. You'll have heard that Neil Jordan's new film features Jodie Foster as Erica Bain, who goes for a walk with her dog and her doctor beau and they end up getting beaten - brutally. Only she survives - oh, and the dog. I'm not kidding.

It's a little hard to believe, but so are most of the clichés in this earnest film. Two street-wise people are in Central Park with a big dog, and they get mugged? If you can believe that, you probably work for a film studio in Los Angeles, and you can also believe that she becomes a killer and goes after criminals wherever she finds them. This doesn't sound like public radio, where terminal sincerity seems to be the rule, on the air at least, and revenge is conducted in secret against anyone who fails to play by the rules. If this sounds like Taxi Driver, wait until you see the scene in a bodega in which Foster is shopping and comes upon a crime, in this case the killing of a cashier by an angry husband. When does homage become plagiarism?

I won't give the end away, but Jodie becomes proficient with the gun fairly quickly, and she uses it on the evildoers out there. At a screening in New York - I missed the film in Toronto - the audience applauded when she smoked the criminals. New York is a safe place these days. Why the thirst for human sacrifice, and the applause for retaliation against a threat that no longer exists?

- David D'Arcy

"Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha is a rare fiction film from the controversial documentarian (although Courtney Love would probably disagree), and it's close to a stunner," the Boston Globe's Ty Burr. "I haven't seen [Redacted], but everyone I've spoken with who has seen both films, and I mean everyone, has said Battle for Haditha makes the De Palma look like a crayon drawing. The irony is that Redacted has a theatrical distributor and the Broomfield film doesn't. Hopefully that will change."

"Younger viewers may not realize Broomfield's dramatic re-creation of the November 2005 Marine massacre of civilians in Iraq is in a Blighty cinema tradition of you-are-there pics - stemming back to Peter Watkins as well as Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers - and are likely to receive pic as a complicated but kick-ass war movie," warns Robert Koehler in Variety. "Politically, Broomfield's [film] is far more humanist and less strident [than Redacted], refusing to convey soldiers in blunt good guy-bad guy terms, while granting much dramatic space to the lives of civilian onlookers and insurgents - nonexistent in De Palma's docudrama."

Online viewing tip. In the NYT, No End in Sight director Charles Furguson sends in a letter to the editor in response to L Paul Bremer III's September 6 op-ed in which Bremer claimed that disbanding the Iraqi army immediately after the US invasion was the "only viable option."

Posted by dwhudson at September 18, 2007 10:04 AM