Matt Steinglass at Democracy in America makes a good contribution to the debate over Iraq war movies:

No doubt there were many supporters of America’s war in Vietnam who found the 1974 documentary masterpiece “Hearts and Minds” unwatchable left-wing propaganda, who hated “M*A*S*H” and “Apocalypse Now”.

This is related to what I was saying in two previous posts. It is unlikely that making films about highly controversial, polarizing wars is going to be anything other than polarizing for both supporters and opponents of the war. It is even more unlikely that there are going to be filmmakers interested in making a film about a war they opposed in such a way that it treats architects of the war sympathetically. If the war in question is still going on, and the war’s loudest supporters are engaging in a lot of triumphalist rhetoric about how they were right all along, that is hardly the time when one can expect antiwar filmmakers to investigate the complex motivations of the war’s architects.

There are some brilliant war movies and brilliant movies set during wartime that are heavily politicized and one-sided in their treatment of the war. Some of the best war movies are not at all sympathetic to the war they are depicting or the leaders responsible for the war. These movies nonetheless explore the humanity of the characters, usually the soldiers fighting in the war, extremely well. Grand Illusion and All Quiet on the Western Front are obvious choices, but for me the finest war movie, and my favorite film of all time, has to be Breaker Morant.

Breaker Morant is not entirely an anti-British movie, but it is directed by Bruce Beresford, an Australian director whose work conveys his anger at what the Empire required of and did to Australians (see also Gallipoli). Despite being set during a completely unjust, imperialist war against the Afrikaner republics, it does not try to valorize the Boers. Indeed, it works very hard at avoiding valorization of any kind. Breaker Morant certainly makes no pretense that the conquest of the republics was anything other than a seizure of land and resources, and near the end Harry Morant pronounced the entire enterprise a “bad cause.” It presents Lord Kitchener as no more and no less than what he was: a British imperialist and military officer who put the concerns of high politics above ethical considerations. The film portrays very powerfully how men in the ranks will be used and cast aside as it suits the government they serve, and it shows how there will often be no accountability for higher-ups for the excesses dictated by the policies ordinary soldiers are forced to carry out. There is certainly no clean divide between good and evil in the way it depicts the war, but it doesn’t pretend that the war was anything other than a destructive and wasteful disaster that didn’t have to happen.