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Star Telegram - Sept. 23, 2007
Hollywood goes to war
By CARY DARLING
Writer Matthew Michael Carnahan makes a living pounding out movie scripts, where flights of fantasy and retreats from reality are the daily stock in trade. But a couple of autumns back, while speeding through TV channels in search of a USC football game, he had an epiphany.
"I was living in Chicago and I flipped past this report about a Humvee [in Iraq] that had flipped, and four or five soldiers had lost their lives. I thought, 'What an awful way to go,' and I couldn't change the channel fast enough to find the game," recalls Carnahan, 34. "Then I thought, 'Here I am, the first to complain about the government and yet here I am, part of the problem, looking for pablum instead of the real stories.' "
So was born Lions for Lambs, the Carnahan-penned, Robert Redford-directed film about politics and the war in the Middle East that stars Redford, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise and Derek Luke. "It's my way of exorcising the sense that I was part of the problem, not doing my share to acknowledge what's going on," Carnahan explains.
He's apparently not alone. Lions for Lambs, opening Nov. 9, is just one of several major Hollywood films headed to multiplexes this season that deal either with the war in Iraq, its fallout or related issues such as terrorism.
In the Valley of Elah, directed by Paul Haggis (Crash) and starring Tommy Lee Jones as a dad whose son disappears after returning from Iraq, opened Friday, as did The Hunting Party, which features Richard Gere and Terrence Howard and chronicles the search for a Serbian war criminal who slaughtered Bosnian Muslims. Loosely based on a true story, the movie ultimately invites comparisons to the search for Osama bin Laden.
Opening this Friday is The Kingdom, which revolves around anti-American terrorism in Saudi Arabia. It stars Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman and was also written by Carnahan.
These films will be followed by: Rendition, starring Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard and Streep again, about a woman whose Egyptian-born husband is detained; and Grace Is Gone, featuring John Cusack as a dad who takes a road trip with his kids after his wife is killed in Iraq.
Two of the most controversial films are based on real events. Brian De Palma (The Untouchables, Scarface, Mission: Impossible) made Redacted, based on the case of American soldiers who raped an Iraqi girl and killed her family, while in Battle for Haditha, Nick Broomfield (Kurt & Courtney, Biggie and Tupac) revisits an alleged 2005 attack by U.S. Marines against two dozen Iraqis believed to have planted roadside bombs.
Coming in early 2008 is Stop Loss, which stars Ryan Phillippe as a soldier who returns home to Texas and refuses to go back to Iraq.
This wave may seem unprecedented, but it was perhaps predictable. Fall is the time when, after a summer of killer robots and wacky pirates, studios haul out their serious, would-be Oscar contenders. These films went into production at different times, so it may be an accident of fate that they're all coming out now, though the trend also might reflect a larger reality.
Richard Allen, professor of radio, TV and film at Texas Christian University, says it's taken a few years for the movie industry to absorb 9-11, and that's why the ripple effects are now percolating through pop culture. "There's the shock, and then it becomes part of the culture and it becomes the thing to do. ...... Filmmakers are trying to be as contemporary as possible as they deal with issues like terrorism. It's an age-old thing. Think of the '50s Cold War and how it inspired science fiction."…
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