A Closer Look at Sundance Favorite 'Restrepo'
Movies, politics and Sundance... What's the message being sent?
Did Sebastian Junger sucker Sundance into supporting an Afghanistan War with no end in sight?
Sebastian Junger lucked into a perfect storm when Restrepo, his feature documentary about a fire base in Afghanistan opened the same week General Stanley McChrystal was forced out as the Commander of US troops in that country (read the original Rolling Stone article on McChrystal here).
Junger was already slated to appear on many TV and radio shows promoting the critically acclaimed Sundance Jury Prize Winner, but when Afghanistan became the biggest news story of the week Junger was added to several guest lists including a well-publicized panel on NBC's Meet The Press. On each of these shows Junger was asked his opinion of the ongoing war and each time he argued for more time and more troops. In other words, more war.
As I watched Junger on these shows I wondered aloud if this is what the programmers at Sundance had in mind when they promoted Junger's film earlier this year and heaped awards and praise on it. I'd like to think they just thought Restrepo was the best documentary out there but I know that isn't really how Sundance works.
They made no bones about pushing their anti-Iraq agenda in 2006 and 2007. The Festival handed out awards to Iraq In Fragments and No End In Sight while Geoffrey Gilmore gave interviews about the ability of documentaries to change the world. Sundance also helped produce and fund Iraq In Fragments and made no bones about the Festival's take on the Iraq War. They were against it.
Now they're supporting a director who is very pro-War, albeit not the Iraq War. It makes me wonder if they've changed their stance on the war. Perhaps they didn't understand what Junger and co-director Tim Hetherington were trying to say with this film? Or did the charming Junger and his modern day Hemmingway shtick just take them in?
I was forced to look at a lot of Afghanistan footage back in 2007 when Junger and Hetherington were visiting the Korangal Valley. I worked on a doc for the Special Forces Command at Ft. Bragg called Why We Fight Now, and part of my job was going through hours and hours of footage shot by the 4th Psychological Operations Group of Special Forces Brigades all over the world.
I've also watched a lot of similar footage on You Tube filmed by the soldiers themselves, including footage from the same Korangal Valley brigade that Junger and Hetherington were embedded with in 2007 and 2008. The 173rd Airborne Brigade.
The 173rd Airborne are what you call "door kickers". Junger and Hetherington make them seem like regular soldiers but they aren't. These are young men who have been trained to go from house to house looking for insurgents. Highly trained.
Restrepo, the film, never talks about the history of the 173rd. The filmmakers never mention that the 173rd is an airborne attack brigade. Junger and Hetherington prefer to focus on the youth of the brigade. Cutting to numerous reaction shots or the youngest looking soldiers. That choice pays off emotionally when the 173rd gets caught in a deadly firefight and lose one of their best soldiers. That footage of the soldiers confronting their own mortality on the battlefield is by far the high point of the film. There's also a great opening aerial shot from a helicopter and Afghanistan is strangely beautiful. There are also a number of moments when we see soldiers interacting with each other in a casual manner even as danger lurks right around the corner. I'd like to say the rest of the film is good but it's not.
Characters are not set up properly and Hetherington's camerawork is shaky. He appears to be more concerned with staying alive than filming the action. (Rightfully so, I should add.) Most of the time it is hard to tell the soldiers apart whether being filmed in Afghanistan or in the later interviews shot back in Italy and used as a framing device for the film.
People will argue that the film is shot cinema verite style; therefore such complaints are moot. I wish that were the case. Unfortunately, Junger and Hetherington are too busy manipulating the audience for that to be true.
Maybe these are the mistakes of novice filmmakers. Or maybe the film itself was an afterthought. He was originally embedded as a print journalist for Vanity Fair. He has stated in interviews that as long as he was already in Afghanistan he figured he'd go ahead and make a movie. Why not? Everyone else with a camera seems to be making documentaries today.
Maybe I'm jaded because I know there are a lot of similar films out there, and I know there is footage like this available from many other sources. Seriously, a quick perusal of You Tube will offer up numerous firefights featuring the 173rd Airborne along with skits, sing alongs and other nonsense straight from the front lines.
A couple of my favorite You Tube vids feature the Afghan National Army in all it's glory and a US Army lead tour of marijuana fields taller than the average American house (right).
Having said that I am glad the Sundance crowd is embracing the film if for no other reason than I think it is important that Americans of all stripes start paying attention to our involvement in the Middle East. As someone who has been to Iraq three times since 2005, I really believe that we need to pay more attention to the people who live on the ground over there.
Personally, I don't support the War in Afghanistan. I don't think it is the "good war" like Sebastian Junger does. I tend to agree with the Afghani women's right's activist Malalai Joya when she says, "You say Iraq War is bad, Afghan War is good. War is war."
But that's me.
The odd thing is that so many film journalists thought Restrepo was an anti-war film. A quick glance at several film blogs from this year's Sundance coverage indicate that a number of film journalists also misunderstood what Junger was trying to say.
IndieWIRE's Anne Thompson wrote after the first screening, "This all-too-timely doc should be seen in theaters; it makes one wonder how effective an outside fighting force could ever be in Afghanistan."
Then there was this statement from filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachael Grady writing for Politics Daily, "… without being overly didactic or ideological, the movie raises important questions about our involvement in Afghanistan, and was a thought-provoking (and non-star-&*$!ing) way to open Sundance 2010."
That would be a neat statement except that Sebastian Junger is a star. The kind of star voted Sexiest Author by People Magazine in 1997. The kind of star that Sundancers eat up. A Vanity Fair contributing, hipster bar owning, best selling author kind of star. And the movie isn't supposed to raise questions about the war. It's supposed to get you to support the troops. To get the country to pony up more men and more treasure in the future.
The fact is Restrepo is much closer in tone and perspective to other flag waving Nat Geo fare like Inside The Green Berets than the kind of docs Heidi and Rachael make like Jesus Camp and 12th and Delaware. (Inside The Green Berets is another doc where the filmmakers film a soldier dying in Afghanistan, but in that film the cameraman gets blown up as well. And they do interviews with the fallen soldier prior to his death so the viewer actually cares about him. Unlike in Restrepo where we care only for the soldiers who are left behind.)
Personally, I wouldn't give a platform to someone like Junger who obviously has an agenda. He did reporting from Afghanistan in the '90s and doesn't want the Taliban to come back. I'm not sure he told Sundance that when he pitched his movie to the powers that be at the festival. But I do know that's what he's telling Charlie Rose now.
So I ask, is Sundance in favor of this war? Or did they just fall for Junger's handsome face?
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Talk about agendas, what's yours?
I think I was up front about my beliefs on the War in Afghanistan. I'm against it.
I guess it pains me to see Junger on show after show after show calling for the US to continue the fight over there while being praised for being "apolitical". He was on CNN yesterday with his pro-war message. I'm merely questioning if that's what his backers in the film festival community had in mind when they gave him so much praise.
Seems like your artical is a personal attack on Junger and because your a liberal, anything other than an antiwar message is wrong. If this perspective was previlent following the attack on Pearl harbor or held by President Rosevelt, Japan and Germany would have been fighting for control of the western hemisphere in Kansas.
Believe me when I say, those of us who serve in the Armed Forces of the United States appreciate people like Sabastian Junger and wish more members of the media would be like him. Unfortunately, most are like yourself but that is what the men and women of the United States Military provide and protect, your right to free speech; men like those who have, and will, serve at Restrepo.
Hmmmm. Not sure what to make of your post. I have a lot of good friends in the Military and I'm not exactly a liberal. I can't really tell if you're really in the Military or not (please don't fault me for having my doubts – and if you're really in the Military I wish you nothing but the best) but I do know that you will not be going to Restrepo as both the small base that was called Restrepo and the entire operation in the Korengal Valley has been withdrawn. The US Military left Korengal and will not be going back. They have also admitted it was probably a mistake to try and operate there in the first place.
Kevin, yours and Don Echols comments fit my take on this review. When creating a review for the general public, one's personal political slants should stay on the side lines and just "give me the facts", man! The reviewer should have had more imput from actual soldiers that have served in these locales such as Echols. I am an over 60 female and I can see through the slanted review and personally feel affronted by it and the lack of support for our troups!!!!
Wow, Paige. Where exactly did I ever imply this was a review. I think it was labeled quite well as an editorial. I won't respond to your other comments since they really aren't worth commenting on. Thanks for reading.
Silly me, I thought film festivals were about good film making. Not judging films differently according to their politics.
And there are reasonable criticisms to be made of the aim and conduct of the war in Afghanistan. (I make some here.) But "more war with no end in sight" is not one of them. That, after all, would equally apply to Churchill's "We will fight them on the beaches" defiance of Nazi Germany in 1940. Or, for that matter, in a different sense, against any welfare program ("more expenditure, with no end in sight").
Wow, that's some blog you wrote there. I'm not sure what you're saying about Afghanistan not being a war with no end in sight. I'm not sure anyone can say right now but certainly the original No End In Sight film was less than prophetic and I'm not willing to make a guess here. I do hope this article was food for thought.
As far as film festivals being about good filmmaking I wish that were the case. Unfortunately it just isn't the case. And it's not all the fault of the festivals. They are dependent on putting fannies in the seats just like anyone else and a Brad Pitt pet project will always get a slot over another film no matter how good that film is.
Having read Junger's book "War" which is based on the same experiences as the movie "Restrepo", I'm very interested in seeing the film and I hope it will be shown in Europe, too. The book is actually not so much about the war in Afghanistan per se, but about what enables soldiers to fight and how they deal with war.
It's very clear from the book, that Junger supports the war in Afghanistan. I don't share Junger's opinion. Nevertheless the book is very informative and interesting to read. As a journalist Junger's problem is that he identifies too much with the people he is writing about. That could spell trouble for a documentary filmmaker as well. But a political movie, which is open about being political, can also be very engaging – especially for a controversial discussion. A film can have its merits, although I reject the political message.
The "intellectual" Left views any dissent from the official list of preset, unexamined views as fallacious, which is about as far from even the most modest description of "intellectual" as can be dreamt up.
This is of course the stuff of Blacklisters and Gulags and all those horrible things Hollywood keened about for decades in the HUAC, and here they are doing the SAME EXACT THING to those who deviate from The Only Acceptable Perspective of the Left.
The Left are goose-steppers. They work tirelessly, like this "documentary" producer, to ram the far-Left's SINGLE movement-wide viewpoint down every single human's throat.
There can be no dissent. Resistance is futile. You WILL be absorbed into the collective.
The Left are the new intolerant majority (of thought) in America. We have all of us traded places, and the Left have become the stodgy, calcified institution, dispatching the forces of closed-mindedness (such as this "documentarist") to discredit and eventually silence all dissent or rejection of the carefully, slavishly-crafted liberal groupthink.
Hey, Mr. Documentarian, you're just a liberal journalist hammering away on a singular viewpoint that was decided decades ago. You aren't stretching the bonds, you aren't pushing the envelope, you aren't even REPORTING. You are a simple archivist for the closed-loop of the American Left. And you'll be an archivist of the end of liberalism in this great nation.
The thuggery and intellectual dishonesty of today's Left is the sad legacy of the Enlightenment: hijacked by rabid ideologues. All of the allegedly-enlightened ones have now become jackbooters who detest and crush dissenting opinion, while rejecting the thought that their own positions are simple ideology and opinion themselves.
But, hey, good luck to you and Professor Obama on imposing your dogma–imported from Europe and not even actually American–on your fellow countrymen.
And I'll assume that the moderators of this fine "open forum" for "open minded discussion" are as intellectually honest as the rest of the Left, and my post will be dutifully scrubbed as being unLiberal, therefore instantly beyond consideration.
Joel Slack, you nailed it. I know how they think and behave because I was once a liberal.
Regarding Sebastian Junger, he played the game with Sundance Film Festival programmers straight, by submitting his film (with name recognition, natch) and keeping his mouth shut, so as not to give away Junger's opinion that contradicts Sundance FIlm Festival programmers' prevalent left-wing (which should be accurately described "Communist") attitude.
I've been to Sundance Film Festival between 1998 and earlier this year with some no-attendance break years. The list of films for premiere, dramatic documentary, short program — if it's about abortion or environmental or "social justice," the acceptance of such films with transparent agenda reflects Sundance Film Festival programmers' encompassing viewpoint like former director G. Gilmore, who introduced "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Earth Days" with capsule reviews in the film guide.
"8: The Mormon Proposition" is a transparently biased (shrill, manipulative and overtly emotional) documentary film that premiered at Sundance, reflective of the programmers' opinion who accepted the films that appease their fabled leftist ideology. Also, Sundance FF tend to accept transparently obscene (not artful but obscene) films for exhibition, such as Bruce LaBruce's artlessly pornographic films. Sundance Film Festival revels in Communist propaganda and artless obscenity if it conveys typical one-note festival word of mouth buttons "edgy," "thought-provoking," "provocative" and "controversial." Believe me, I've been there and seen it all, and I don't think I should return to Sundance Film Festival anymore (I saw only one film this year) because I'm sick of transparent liberal bias and shameless sycophancy (among pretentious, know-it-all rose-colored glass-wearing people from California and New York) rampant at the festival.
There's no such a thing as balanced film programming at Sundance Film Festival because it does not exist, per my observation. Mr. Junger knows Sundance FF's bias well, and he rolled the dice and got the upper hand at countering 'Neo-Communist' ideology wore on the chest by the programmers with a film that has been accepted without second thought.
I don't support war in Afghanistan and Iraq (my opinion), and I find Bill Cody's claim he is not "exactly a liberal" sort of disingenuous. At least he admits the programming staff at Sundance Film festival is very biased that surprised him about Junger's clever game, which he (laughably I might add) admonish only after Junger revealed his pro-war stance in the media, long after Sundance premiere of his film.
Well-played, Junger.
Personally, I commend Mr. Cody for being intellectually honest enough to admit that festivals like Sundance aren't actually interested in "art" so much as in dissemenating Leftist propaganda.
Restrepo has certainly succeeded in one of the film-makers' intentions: to get people talking about Afghanistan, what we're trying to do there, and what impacts this all has on the men and women we send to fight our battles.
What is interesting in this dialogue is how so many believe that the film reinforces their position — even when these positions are diametrically opposite.
Cody, if I understand you, you believe that the film accomplishes this through subterfuge: those that see Restrepo as anti-war are guileless.
But it's the lack of a narrator that allows for diverse interpretations. The movie doesn't tell you how to think, it isn't overwrought with talking heads…
My interpretation of the film's acclaim from soldiers isn't because they see it as pro-war (or anti-war, depending on their politics), but because the soldiers see the film as 'true'.
Again, the lack of a narrator helps achieve this. The soldiers speak for themselves.
—
As far as Junger's position — I can't speak for him, but my interpretation of his interviews is that, just as he wants us to understand the impact of war on soldiers, he wants us to understand the impact of the war on Afghanistan. He wants us to understand what life was like under the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda supporters.
I hope we reduce our military support–but I take Junger's point. We must devise a strategy that avoids a reversion to the abuses of the Taliban and other such extremists. As bad as the war is, things were much worse.
Of course, this doesn't mean that they can't be better without NATO presence. Just that things aren't going to be better on their own.
Hmmm, well I think I stirred something up here which is fine by me. I don't know that Junger's flick is exactly "true" but that's my own opinion. I think the film shows one small part of the Afghan conflict and actually not even a very successful one. Which is why we have already pulled out of Korengal.
I think I stated quite clearly that I think it is good that people are seeing Junger's film. Especially those who have not been inclined to view such footage even though it is available all over the place. I think the more the merrier when it comes to both conflicts. I think the country has been very neglectful in taking notice of what is going on in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
As far as the abuses in Afghanistan I don't think outsiders can ever be good decision makers about what will help a country get out of such a cycle. The history of Rwanda tells us that. I'm not sure that most Americans even realize that the Tutsi's who were initially getting slaughtered (those are the images that Americans still remember) gradually retook the country. That they followed their victory by pardoning those Hutu's who were involved in the slaughter, pulled the country together and have increased GDP by 70% in the last ten years.
Rwanda is one of the more successful African countries over the last 15 years. Would that have happened if we had decided to get involved in the country like some many Americans believe should have happened? I don't know. I just know they are working out their problems and the country is doing well. And we did not intercede.
I do know, however, that most Americans have no idea the Rwanda story had a happy ending. There's no flick out there about that.
I'd rather not get into the Rwanda analysis — it is very complicated and continues to be (see DRC). I haven't seen this movie, but you might be interested that the president of Rwanda was at this year's tribeca festival for a movie about post-genocide Rwanda:
Rwanda:http://blog.shankbone.org/2010/04/26/president-paul-kagame-of-rwanda-in-nyc-for-tribeca-film-festival/
I'm happy to agree to agree on the fact that it is good that people are seeing Restrepo.
Thanks for the update. I'm glad that movie is out there as well.
All I'm saying is these issues are complicated and all too often documentary films are hailed as solution when they really should be jumping off points for discussions. I myself will defend War in Iraq as a success. That's probably because I've been there many times and love my friends over there. But I also know it's a very complicated situation over there. (BTW – The only film/TV I really trust on the issue is the web-series Hometown Baghdad because it was made by Iraqis. I was thrilled it got picked up by the Sundance Channel and shown on the air.)
Hmmm. I'm wondering if you saw the film before this review was written? Several times i see "what Junger was trying to say with this film". Yet, since I've seen the film and read the book and reviewed the website… I understand that there is no political message about the war at all in the film. You didn't like Sebastian in later interviews? Ok. But the film focuses on the one platoon he embedded with, whatever ages those soldiers happened to be at that site, and their life at war. If you could please identify anyplace in the film itself where there is some political agenda or commentary? I'll look again. I'm afraid it isn't there and the review doesn't read credible. Just personal. About YOUR feelings about the war maybe. The film, a real review, is intensly realistic. Portrays imperfect young men in impossible situations displaying incredible bravery and coping. It made me extremely proud of them. I support the kickin of a door now an then. Or do you disagree with what 9/11 said too? sheesh
Do yourself a favor and watch this interview:
http://bit.ly/cDmUXU
Like this post, you may walk away with the opinion you walked in with, but it's not anythink similar to Charlie Rose.