This is hardly a spoiler for a documentary that can’t resolve its, and our, darkest quandaries. But at the end of Errol Morris’ “Standard Operating Procedure,” Tim Dugan talks about the hundreds of birds that lived in the date palms outside Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where he was a contract interrogator.
He learned to take comfort in the fact they would swarm out of the trees at sunrise, swarm back in at sunset.
After watching Morris’ compelling, vexing documentary about the Iraq prison debacle that immeasurably damaged this nation’s reputation, you, too, might seek the solace of birds making their quotidian racket in the trees as they begin and then end their days.
Ultimately, “Standard Operating Procedure” is a movie about photographs.
What factual proof and implied evidence do those infamous photos taken by American solidiers provide?
There’s Army Specialist Charles Graner looking like he’s about to punch a detainee. (He is serving out his prison sentence.) There’s 372nd MP Pfc. Lynndie England smiling into the camera and flashing a thumbs up while a blindfolded detainee holds his genitals.
There’s another snapshot of 372nd Specialist Sabrina Harman flashing her thumb upward while bending over a corpse.
What story do those photographs tell?
Dugan becomes one of those thoughtful interviewees you come to trust (or I did) to help navigate the testimony of the other talking heads in the tortuous tale of abuse.
Was Abu Ghraib a disaster wrought by a few soldiers who acted on their own to torment, humiliate and torture Iraqi prisoners? Or were they operating within a wartime culture that led them to believe their acts were S.O.P.?
Unreliable narrators abound to answer or deflect those questions. Though the film makes a good case that those aren’t entirely the right questions.
“Standard Operating Procedure” encourages us not to judge but to try to understand. Or, barring that impossibility, it prods us like the finest documentaries to watch and listen.
England’s and Harman’s unreliability isn’t always due to mendacity. Listening to these former soldiers made famous by their own camerawork, one is struck as much by their lack of self-knowledge as by their attempts to make execuses for, or simply explain, their actions.
Juval Davis, a sergeant and guard at the time, is the most forthright of the soldiers. (Jeremy Sivits is arguably the most heartbreaking.) He’s not alone in making the argument that he and other soldiers were railroaded, or as Dugan says, “thrown under the bus.”
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, now busted down to colonel and a fixture in a number of Iraq war docs, is a fiery presence here.
Morris has made some of our most damning, elegant and powerfully intelligent documentaries. “The Thin Blue Line” (1988) helped free Randall Adams, an inmate on Texas’ death row. More recently, the Oscar-winning “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara” (2003) challenged audiences with its portrait of one of the architects of the Vietnam War.
McNamara’s confession (of a sort) offers a key to understanding how political hubris can lead to a foreign policy and humanitarian disaster.
But after a second viewing of “Standard Operating Procedure,” I wondered even more if Morris has made too elegant a film. (His and New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch’s companion book is remarkable.)
The film’s beauty — it was shot by Robert Chappell and Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson — starts to feel like a defense for not being able to resolve the horrors depicted.
Playing cards with Uday and Qusay Hussein’s faces on them are filmed falling in slow motion. One might imagine the shots are included to break up “talking head” monotony. Only Morris is an astute interrogator and the interviews are consistently fascinating. The slo-mo beauty seems beside the point.
The close-up of a dog snarling, its spittle making slow arcs, underscores Sabrina Harman’s recounting of a detainee bitten. But it’s one more re-creation that raises unneeded questions about voyeurism.
One of the disturbing things about “Standard Operating Procedure” is that no matter how often we see them in the photographs, Iraqis are not part of the reckoning. The guys in the naked pyramid remain nameless, voiceless.
Late in the film, Brent Pack, special agent for the Criminal Investigations Division, discusses how he analyzed the countless photos from Abu Ghraib.
The snapshots the world saw are stamped as either “Criminal Act” or “S.O.P.”
Pack explains the difference.
The former all have perpetrators in them. The latter pictures, just as disturbing, if not more so, show the Iraqi detainees alone.
Danny Elfman’s musical score aggravates at times. But he also finds appropriately mournful notes.
They hint at a requiem we continue to compose.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com. Also on blogs.denverpostcom/madmoviegoer
“Standard Operating Procedure”
R for disturbing images and content involving torture and graphic nudity, and for language. 1 hour, 57 minutes. Directed by Errol Morris; edited by Andy Grieve, photography by Robert Chappell and Robert Richardson; featuring Juval Davis, Ken Davis, Tim Dugan, Lynndie England, Megan Ambuhl Franer, Sabrina Harman, Janis Karpinski, Roman Krol, Jeremy Sivits, Brent Pack. Opens today at the Mayan theatre.
