LITTLE ROCK — Restrepo is a documentary about American soldiers fighting in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, which we are told — and have to believe — is perhaps the most dangerous place on earth. It is a remarkable if not entirely successful film that immerses us in the insanity of combat and gives us the illusion that we understand a little of what it must be like to be in a firefight with an invisible enemy.
It is also an immensely sad film, in that it makes manifest the waste of human life and energy that is an inherent consequence of war. It shows us young men in tremendous peril, operating under the imminent threat of death. It shows that they can be courageous and competent, compassionate and terrorized, and achingly human. The young men in this movie are intelligent yet slightly credulous, obviously informed as much by the war movies they’ve watched as by the metal-jacketed reality that confronts them on a daily basis.
The directors, photographer Tim Hetherington and journalist Sebastian Junger (he wrote the best-seller The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea), spent a year embedded with a platoon in the Korengal Valley, taking fire daily and, apparently, humping along with the soldiers even on their deadliest missions. They came back with some 150 hours of footage, supplemented with interviews with some of the soldiers once they had rotated stateside.
Restrepo is a cinema verite documentary, which means it is presented without narration or commentary from “experts” who were not directly involved in the events captured on film. Hetherington and Junger mean only to present us with a sense of what it’s like to be in combat; they’ve insisted that Restrepo — which is named for a 20-yearold member of the platoon who was killed in action and subsequently memorialized by his buddies, who named a strategic outpost after him — “is a completely apolitical film” with “no moral or political analysis.”
Yet the lack of context leaves us with no sense of what the soldiers are trying to accomplish or how this fits in with any larger strategy. And while this dislocation and confusion may simulate the mental state of the soldier prepared to do or die (or possibly do and die) it feels just a little disingenuous. It is a commonplace that war is madness, and that its main component is boredom. Restrepo is in some ways the most harrowing film I’ve ever seen — these are kids (even the 29-year-old company commander, Capt. Dan Kearney, seems callow) and there’s nothing in the movie that suggests there’s anything like a point to the risks they’re taking — but it doesn’t provide us with any context beyond the soldiers’ thoughtful stateside interviews.
This isn’t really a criticism so much as a caveat — watching Restrepo won’t teach you about our policy in Afghanistan. It will only give you a glimpse of hell.
MovieStyle, Pages 34 on 08/13/2010