No one ever
accused Nick Broomfield of being a particularly elegant filmmaker. A certain
studied clumsiness is central to his whole aesthetic. In documentaries like Kurt
& Courtney and Aileen
Wuornos: The Selling Of A Serial Killer, Broomfield, the sly Columbo of non-fiction filmmakers,
calculatingly plays the fool so that his sleazy subjects will let their guards
down and let the ugliness and greed at the core of their being ooze out. With
its occasionally stilted acting and clumsy dialogue, Broomfield's scrappy new
docudrama Battle For Haditha sometimes feels like an amateur remake of Jarhead. Yet it ultimately derives much of
its primal power from its bluntness and simplicity. Like Broomfield's
documentary work, it stumbles purposefully onto harsh truths about the ugliness
of human nature.
Based on
the Haditha killings and filmed documentary-style using former servicemen and a
rough outline instead of a detailed script, Battle For Haditha dramatizes a notorious incident
wherein 24 Iraqis, primarily civilians and non-combatants, were killed by
Marines in retaliation for the killing of an American soldier via an IED.
Broomfield cuts back and forth between American troops pushed past the breaking
point, the men responsible for the IED, and innocent women and children unlucky
enough to be in the wrong place in the wrong time.
Broomfield
isn't shy about using his characters as mouthpieces to express broad
philosophical statements about the War On Terror. But his film gains a
cumulative power as it marches relentlessly towards the defining moment where
law and order breaks down entirely and gives way to madness and slaughter. As
in so many Iraq War movies, the soldiers here are little more than kids,
overgrown jocks barely able to buy liquor legally yet given the power of life
and death through uniforms that are a source of both power and powerlessness.
Though utterly damning in his depiction of the U.S. military, Broomfield takes
pains to humanize both sides of the conflict; though he does monstrous things,
the film's lead character (Elliot Ruiz) is far from a monster. Unsubtle but
gripping, Battle For Haditha illustrates how a military that treats every man, woman,
and child as a potential enemy can soon find that such thinking constitutes a
self-fulfilling prophecy.