Green Zone and The Red Shoes (Movie Reviews)

Green Zone sees director Paul Greengrass and actor Matt Damon re-teaming after two successful forays in the Bourne series. Greengrass, a few years back, made the powerful 9/11 film United 93, which combined potent social commentary with his cinema verite stylistics. He looks again to make a statement, this time with the second Iraq war.

There are two possibly problematic points that Green Zone immediately runs into. The first is that the visual style that Greengrass employs, which upped the bar and created a palpable sense of realism in his earlier films, has by now been aped by countless imitators with varying degrees of success. The shaky handheld cam is no longer a new thing to witness, and it’s possible that aside from its sometimes dizzying effects, the other impacts it once had are now softened by its overuse.

Despite the droves of imitators, Greengrass still provides a film packed with visual verve, his images are vibrant. There is always action, or the threat of it. Movements are frenetic and this keeps the viewers on their toes as their eyes whip across the screen, imitating the camera that’s always searching, zooming in and out, looking here and there almost as if it were afraid that the object being looked at would suddenly look back.

The other possible problem is the political context within which the film works, and the obvious need to make a statement. Where United 93 managed to employ a measure of subtlety in making its statements, Green Zone stumbles. Of course it would be more difficult to explain the dynamics of the chaotic political situation after Saddam Hussein was deposed and there were attempts to bring Iraq under control. But when we have the messages spewing forth from dialogue, rather than being illustrated or at least better played out, then there is something to look for. Despite its heavy-handedness at times, though, the film is successful in showing in a novel manner the kinds of conflicts, and the different depths of such conflicts that the Americans should have anticipated, as well as hinting powerfully to the adverse effects that those decisions have made.

Matt Damon is, as usual, outstanding in his portrayal of Chief Miller, who leads his military unit in search of non-existent WMDs. When he keeps coming up empty he starts to become suspicious, asking questions above his pay grade. A CIA man, played by Brendan Gleeson, agrees with Miller’s suspicions and encourages him to keep digging, while a conniving White House exec played by Greg Kinnear tries to keep things under wraps. Miller’s search reveals things that we the audience already know, but it’s still a ride despite the lack of surprises, because of the well-shot sequences.

Green Zone doesn’t really provide us with anything new, nor does it stand as a particularly important film. It is, for its duration at least, very entertaining. Its visual verve is enough to keep an audience excited, and though it does get bogged down in all too simple revelations or expository dialogue about political dynamics at times, it delivers an entertaining, action-packed flick. For the hour and a half or so that I was in the theater my eyes were stuck to the screen and I was enjoying myself.

This is, sadly, more than I can say for this week’s other film, The Red Shoes.

Great concept, but...

What that film had going for it was its great concept. It was this concept that got me into the theater, despite my wariness of things that might turn into love-team driven drivel. As it turns out, no love-team here, just a lot of drivel.

A young boy, in the midst of the Edsa Revolution, breaks into Malacanang and takes a pair of Imelda Marcos’s shoes. He gives one shoe to his mother and the other to his childhood love. Where we find him, and the shoes, much later, is what we are supposed to care about in the film. While we do find those things, the film generally fails to make us care one way or the other.

There are novel touches here, back stories and well-shot sequences. There are moments that are genuinely endearing. Sadly, these moments are too few, and buried in a sea of saccharine and bad acting. One has to commend Marvin Agustin, whose character Lucas can be perceived as superficial and uncaring, but manages to make him at least likeable. There are times when his character is written as a despicable ass (because he has issues with his girlfriend being richer than him, he winds up cheating on her; naked, in bed and playing with another girl’s feet one moment, the next moment he is breaking up with her for hardly any reason) because he does things with little or no motivation. Yet Agustin plays him honestly and makes us care at least a little. The veterans of the cast do alright, but the rest of it is acted pretty unconvincingly, if not badly.

Furthering the film’s problems is its nonlinear narrative. While I am all for challenging viewers with non-linear narratives (heck, I love stuff like Memento) it seems that the grasp on the narrative in this film is too loose. Instead of various points in time having resonance thanks to their overlapping in the narrative, the movie jumps haphazardly between past time settings. Further making it problematic is that we can’t really establish the chronology in our heads, because there aren’t clear signposts or visual signals for time settings. As we jump through time settings we start running into logical inconsistencies which cannot be resolved.

Instead of working better on the level of visual language, a lot of the film is told through voice over or expository dialogue. These are two tools that are generally regarded as lazy writing. Some films do employ these techniques in intelligent ways to enhance the film, showing that these are tools that can be effective and that are not necessarily used only by the lazy writer. Sadly, The Red Shoes is not one of these films. Not only are those techniques overused and not maximized for dramatic effect, but most of the characters’ dialogues seem like rehashes, stuff we’ve heard before.

While one has to commend The Red Shoes for its premise and its attempt at doing things differently, or in a novel way, one cannot escape the many things that the film fails at. It makes all the mistakes that the usual big studio love-team romances make; a sad thing considering it’s an indie and it has been marketed as something decidedly more artistic. Its fall into the pit of sentimentality and cuteness is a shame, because it had such potential at the idea level.

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