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Fight plan America's lust for war explored By Susan Gerharda&eletters@sfbg.com Every successful agitdoc has to have a star. For those not on the Robert Greenwald e-mail list, it's not enough to simply present the sobering faces of Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, and a supporting cast of whistle-blowing ex-spies. To make it to the top of the antiwar-movie heap these days, you can't simply present a brilliant idea — you have to go for the marquee value. Michael Moore generously backed away from the spotlight long enough to give George Bush an opportunity to display his comedic skills in Fahrenheit 9/11. Robert McNamara certainly earned Errol Morris his Oscar with the obfuscatory performance of the century in The Fog of War. And Eugene Jarecki found a song-and-dance man who could also play a great villain with his first big documentary a few years back, The Trials of Henry Kissinger. The ideas of that film were mostly Christopher Hitchens's, but, if you've seen that particular pundit of late, you know he isn't going any further than the character-acting department. Kissinger, on the other hand, could swing. This time around, Eugene Jarecki likes Ike, and uses Eisenhower's middle-finger farewell address to the nation as his starting point for his antiwar documentary Why We Fight. Eisenhower echoed George Washington's warning about standing armies and the building of empires but gave the old concept a new name: the military industrial complex. In a country newly, broadly, and loonily employed by the military, no one, it seems, was listening. Where Frank Capra's short propaganda film series by the same name urged a country to dutifully take its steroids and win WWII, Jarecki's film questions the massive military apparatus that has only grown exponentially since the close of that war. His answer to the question "Why do we fight?" is simple: because war is a moneymaker. The trouble lies in the circuitous path Jarecki takes to get there. We have the historical figure resuscitated, Fog of War style — with Eisenhower, the Republican general, becoming the country's greatest voice for peace. We have the man-on-the-street interviews — far too many of them, cruelly edited to highlight the notion that our education system has completely failed. And we are treated to an ensemble cast of conflicted characters engaged in America's most awful enterprises: William Solomon, a 23-year-old who just lost his single parent and has nowhere to go but to the Army recruitment office; Anh Duong, a Vietnamese war refugee who designs bunker busters; Wilton Sekzer, a retired NYC police officer who lost a son in Tower One of the World Trade Center but regrets memorializing his son's name on a missile headed for Iraq; and Karen Kwiatkowski — a face seen in many of the left's antiwar docs these past few years — a Pentagon analyst who turned against her employers when she realized just how strange the Bush-era "intelligence" analysis was getting. Conflicted souls like these are key to building the better documentary, but with so many of them to choose from, the through-line gets diluted. Particularly when this film supplements their struggles by plucking America's Most Naive from the heartland to expose their ignorance. (And why is confronting a powerful public figure, guerrilla-style, in the seat of power, Washington, DC, as Michael Moore did, seen as more unkind than Jarecki's sound-bite slams of America's Average Janes?) I know I get booed off the stage every time I offer up this idea; however, Moore's short, sentimental damnation of democracy gone empire-mad in Bowling for Columbine — the Louis Armstrong "What a Wonderful World" montage — is worth a million minor moments of talking head confession. But please: If you are in any way unclear about the reason we are in a state of perpetual war for perpetual peace, don't let me dissuade you from seeing this film. Afterwards we can argue over the details. *
Opens Fri/10 Lumiere Theatre (415) 267-4893 Shattuck Cinemas (510) 464-5980 For showtimes go to www.sfbg.com
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