If cinema is a magic trick that obscures as much as it enlightens, what is the value of a war movie? I couldn’t stop mulling this sentiment while watching “Warfare,” a nearly real-time recounting of a Navy SEAL platoon’s experiences in Ramadi, Iraq in 2006. Written and directed by “Civil War” filmmaker Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza, one of the SEALS who survived this very incident, the film eschews traditional narrative propulsion and dramatic contrivance in lieu of cold, punishing reality presented without frills or editorialization; a Rorschach test for the soul.
Crafted from the collective memories of a Navy SEAL team Alpha One during the US occupation of Iraq, “Warfare” is a film unlike any I’ve seen told on such a massive scale, a fly-on-the-wall war film without the artifice of fiction to rely upon. There is no grandiosity to the proceedings. The narrative setup is simple: a team of SEALS treks into a residential home in the night, waking the unsuspecting families living there. A hard cut to the next morning shows the home transformed into a base of operations, with a sniper hole carved out of one wall and SEALS manning the windows, watching the bustling crowds outside for signs of trouble. They know something will happen, though they’re praying it won’t. We know that something will happen because we’re watching a movie. But once the bombs start blowing, the second act of “Warfare’s” magic trick presents itself. As our SEALS are battered and bloodied, banded together, or screaming from their wounds, Garland and Mendoza settle us into the chaos and won’t let us up for air. I’ve never heard so many different, equally terrifying rounds of gunfire in my life. Watching “Warfare” in a theater with good sound is like sticking your head into a metal bucket and walking through an active gun range. Each shot is visceral, each bullet whizzing past feels terminal, and the destruction of every human life in the middle of this madness feels inevitable.
There is a moment late in the film when Will Poulter (“The Bear”), the wounded commander of our main group of SEALS, finds himself in a room where the Iraqi family whose house they are occupying are huddling in fear. The little girls are crying, the parents are covering them and trying to assure the kids that everything will be OK, while knowing no such thing. Poulter sees this, an American Navy SEAL gacked from head to toe in the mechanisms of war, and apologizes to them. It’s all he can do. He can’t take back the invasion of their country or the leveling of their home. He can’t take back the terror the daughters will carry with them for the rest of their lives. He can’t stop the pain or the devastation. All one man can do is say he is sorry, for all that’s worth.
I left the movie with this moment wedged into my mind, alongside the image of an Iraqi interpreter with his guts splayed across the road and the bone-shattering sound of an Air Force jet buzzing the neighborhood as a “show of force.” War may be hell, but that doesn’t even put a fine enough point on it. Hell is believed to be a place where the wicked are punished for their crimes and atrocities. Yet, as I watched “Warfare,” I couldn’t help but think this was something else. Something worse. Something beyond glory or salvation, a vicious whirlwind that shreds the compassionate and the “bad guys” and everyone in between; a Jackson Pollack atrocity of warring aristocrats and scared little girls. If there was ever a film that found a way not to glorify war, “Warfare” might be sniffing the impossible. It is commendable for much, but perhaps mostly for that.
There is no “story” at play in “Warfare,” only memories, only the factual actions of men trying to do their job while remaining alive. But while “Warfare” skids along the fine line of narrative and documentary, it’s easy for an audience to get sucked into the action and expect some grand conclusion, some final act of heroism or tragedy. But that is not the truth of “Warfare”, the film or the reality. As the main story ends, the film reveals its own artifice through a traditional “matching of actors to the real people” montage interspersed with something much more radical: behind-the-scenes footage of the making of the film. This is not some DVD special feature, this is part of the movie. Not unlike a top-hatted magician showing that the woman was not, in fact, sawed in half, Garland and Mendoza remind us that whatever we just saw was an illusion, a funhouse mirror depicting reality as best it can while failing to encompass its enormity. We see blue screens and stunt rehearsals, reunions between actors in the film and their real-life counterparts. Instead of leaving the movie shaken by the events portrayed, I left consumed by the fact that I do not understand war, though I’ve seen a hundred films portraying it. “Warfare,” at least, has the courage to show its stacked hand to the crowd and remind us that sawing a woman in half is much messier in real life.
During this final section, some of the real-life photos of the Navy SEALS have their faces blurred, done so to protect their identities presumably. But then, the film shows another photo, one of the Iraqi family whose home is the central location of the film’s bloodshed. Their faces are blurred as well, a symbol of their unconsenting status as combatants in a battle they didn’t seek out or deserve. Alex Garland likes to imagine himself as an apolitical filmmaker, but I believe the director doth protest too much. His heart is right there, within the blurred-out faces of people ravaged by the reality of his, barely, fiction. Perhaps this family’s inclusion is Garland’s own form of honoring them, an apology for the ravaging of their world by someone who didn’t cause it.
But, as the film seemingly understands, what good is an apology in war?
“Warfare” somehow balances itself as timely and, perversely, engrossing. It shows us things in ways that we’ve never seen them and deserves to be reckoned with.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Warfare” is showing at The Broad Theater and Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
