Nick Broomfield is best known as the British documentarian whose sensational subjects -- Heidi Fleiss, Aileen Wuornos, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, Biggie and Tupac -- tend to take a backseat to his favorite topic: himself. Less known is Broomfield's small fictional output (DIAMOND SKULLS, GHOSTS) of which this pseudo-documentary is the latest example. Strange, then, that he should choose a subject crying out for a clear-eyed, nonfictional treatment: The massacre of 24 innocent Iraqi men, women in children by a company of U.S. Marines at Haditha in the Anbar province of Iraq in November, 2005. Broomfield's film is didactic, awkwardly acted by the cast of former Marines who are meant to lend the film credibility, and clumsily inflammatory.
November 18, 2005. After a morning spent tearing up the desert joyriding in their Humvees and an afternoon checking the chow situation at a roadblock, a platoon of restless, "ooh-rah" shouting Marines led by 20-year-old Corporal Ramirez (Elliot Ruiz) are sent into a residential section of Haditha to investigate suspected insurgent activity. This suspicion, it turns out, is not unfounded: Earlier that afternoon, Jafar (Oliver Bytrus), the affable clerk at a local electronics store frequented by U.S. soldiers, and older Ahmad (Falah Abraheem Flayeh), a former Iraqi solider who lost his livelihood and his pride when the invading U.S. forces ill-advisedly dissolved the Iraqi army two years earlier, met with a group of foreign "fighters" who have promised to pay them $1000 to plant a cell-phone controlled IED -- an improvised explosive device -- in the path of U.S. soldiers. The two men carry the bomb back to Haditha and, in broad daylight, bury it on the roadside directly outside the home of Rashied (Duraid A. Ghaieb) and his young, pregnant wife, Hiba (Yasmine Hanani), who has spent the morning preparing for a circumcision celebration. Hiba and several of her neighbors know exactly what is happening but, fearful of reprisals from insurgents, say nothing. The party goes on as planned and, in the early morning hours of the following day, the bomb explodes, killing one soldier in Corporal Ramirez's company and seriously wounding two others. The violence triggers a terrifying reaction among the Marines, who take their revenge on the most innocent and turn Haditha into a latter day May Lai.
If there was a battle for Haditha in 2005, it occurred several months before the atrocities of November when U.S. Marines attempted to purge the city of the controlling insurgency. One assumes then that Broomfield is likening his film to Gillo Pontecorvo's masterful THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1966), which used a similar semi-documentary style to explore another act of violent rebellion and brutal reprisal from a variety of perspectives. Here we get the angry and frustrated insurgents who make a deal with devils, allying themselves with the same foreign terrorists who leave the bodies of Iraqi English teachers in the street as a warning to "collaborators" and plan to further "Islamicize" their fair city by murdering anyone found selling alcohol. We're also shown ordinary Iraqi civilians caught between the insurgents and the coalition forces: If they go to the U.S. soldiers with information about possible terrorist activity, they'll be punished by the terrorists; if they don't, the Americans will accuse them of cooperating with the enemy. And then, most troubling, are Broomfield's U.S. Marines who, with the deaths of over 50 of their fellow soldiers from insurgents' IEDs fresh on their minds, are wary and angry and itching to "hunt." Though Broomfield tries to soften his depiction by contrasting them with their downright evil superiors in Ramadi who coldly order the death of innocents with a push of a button and appear to sanction the massacre at Haditha, the 48-hour time frame doesn't allow for much context. With the exception of the nightmare-plagued Ramirez -- who is pointedly denied the psychological help he seeks -- the U.S. soldiers are shown to be little better than thugs whom the pressures of war have turned into bloodthirsty, high-fiving cretins. If Broomfield hoped to shed some light on what happened at Haditha beyond our worst preconceptions, he's failed. leave a comment --Ken Fox
