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Gunner Palace

2005, Movie, R, 85 mins

Gunner Palace: Review

GUNNER PALACE
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In September 2003, cameraman Michael Tucker moved into "Gunner Palace," the bombed-out Baghdad pleasure dome of Saddam Hussein's son Uday. The Army's 2nd Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment — the "Gunners" of the 2/3 FA — moved into this sprawling, obscenely gilded playground in the heart of Adhamiya, an insurgent-riddled neighborhood, after the fall of Hussein's regime. Tucker saw a rare — and dangerous — opportunity to record first-hand what most Americans experience only through heavily mediated news reports. Tucker, who narrates his own experiences in a tough-guy growl, believes that audiences weaned on reality-TV like Survivor mistake entertainment for news and need a dose of real reality. "Survive this," one soldier dares. "A year in Baghdad without changing the channel." Tucker's idea of reality, however, looks and sounds a lot like entertainment. Tucker bunked with the soldiers for two months and got as close to their experiences as possible without actually engaging in combat. As Armed Forces Radio broadcasts absurdly optimistic reports from Donald Rumsfeld, Tucker accompanies the Gunners on routine daytime patrols through streets where, as one man puts it, soldiers are "policemen, social workers and truant officers" for a society with no infrastructure, while keeping a sharp eye on every box and bag in the garbage-filled gutters. Each is a potential roadside "IED" — a deadly Improvised Explosive Device. At night, patrols with names like Roughriders and Colt Team dodge mortar fire and rocks as they break into Iraqi homes, seeking weapons caches and hoping to rout dangerous Saddam loyalists. All too often, they come up empty. During their down time, the soldiers loll around the late Uday's pool and express their fears and frustrations directly into the camera or through the lyrics of freestyle raps. Few have anything to say about patriotism; one admits that he can't see what U.S. operations in Iraq have to do with protecting his country. They emerge as real people in the middle of a surreal nightmare, risking their lives for people who can no longer distinguish between fiction and reality. But good intentions aside, Tucker and codirector Petra Epperlein only further confuse the issue: Their rap-video stylings and use of non-source music create the impression that you're watching characters trapped in a Tom Clancy Xbox game. And is that night patrol really blasting Wagner's The Ride of the Valkyries? Or is it only Tucker referencing the fictitious war-is-hell nightmare APOCALYPSE NOW? Hard to say, and that's part of the problem. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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