“The reasons we go to war always fucking matter!”

Rating: 3 stars (out of 4)

That line serves as both the kiss-off and take-away message of Green Zone, the adroitly executed new thriller from the Matt Damon/Paul Greengrass team.  Green Zone functions perfectly as a balance between real-world issues and fantastical action thrills, a sort of 2010 version of Blood Diamond.  This is the rare action movie with a brain, a perfect sense of pacing, no cringe-inducing dialogue, and real actors.  It knows exactly what buttons to push: just when you’re ready for exposition to cease and the action to accelerate, it does that; and right when it needs to slow down, it does that. 

Such feelings are given a purpose beyond mere entertainment thanks to a story that, although it doesn’t quite make this movie into a classic in the genre, may make the hairs on your neck stand up.  Damon plays Roy Miller, a chief warrant officer in the U.S. army deployed shortly after the start of the Iraq War in 2003 to find WMDs.  When Miller’s crew keeps coming up empty at sites fingered by credible sources, he refuses to accept the red tape that he gets as answers.  He thus becomes that classic American hero, the lone soldier off in search of the truth.  This time, however, we know what the truth is, and we know that he’s not going to like what he finds. 

That’s why it doesn’t matter that Green Zone isn’t purely factual—indeed, it would have failed as such.  It’s enough to have a basis in fact from which we can be entertained.  Adapted loosely from Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book The Imperial Life in the Emerald City (by Brian Helgeland, writer of L.A. Confidential and Mystic River), its central question—plus the energy level—place it on much more inherently interesting footing than the typically turgid ‘war is hell’ movies.  It’s not necessarily an anti-war film, but it’s an anti- ‘war film.’   

Helgeland’s film introduces several characters accepted to be unnamed stand-ins for certain Iraq War players.  Amy Ryan’s reporter peddling pro-Bush administration stories can be assumed to represent The New York Times’s Judith Miller, and Greg Kinnear’s Pentagon-connected bureaucrat could be lots of people.  Miller finds help primarily from CIA lifer Marty Brown (an effective Brendan Gleeson) and an Iraqi native called Freddy who’d just like some measure of normalcy in his country (Khalid Abdalla with the most stirring performance).

All of this is put together with an excellent tone that’s neither ponderous nor flippant.  Helgeland’s script briefly touches on deeper questions people might be inclined to discuss afterwards, like whether we should have involved the Iraqi army more after Saddam fled.  The ending narrows the perspective a little bit, as tends to happen in thrillers, and so it will take repeated viewings to really determine what place Green Zone has in the pantheon of action thrillers.  But the gaps are filled in by Damon, who continues his remarkable run of the last seven months (after 2009’s The Informant! and Invictus) and does such a good job that I can’t really imagine any other actor in the role.   

I anticipated Green Zone for almost a year, but I also worried that it would become the next Kingdom.  Damon and Greengrass and Helgeland wouldn’t let it.  As it went along, I noticed no awkward scenes, no unnecessary characters, and no choppy dialogue, all of which were eschewed for crisp plotting and Greengrass’s own considerable skills.  That’s a wonderful sense to have as you sit and watch a movie, and such warm and fuzzy feelings are embellished by the expert direction.  No specific set pieces here compare to the best of the Bournes (what do?), but Greengrass continues his ascension to the top of the ranks of action directors, his visual style again imparting incredible energy and intensity without ever sacrificing clarity.  Working off a slightly-tamed version of the Bourne shaky cam, Greengrass uses long takes and then fast cuts, off-center visuals and ever-so-briefly seen critical pieces of information that he congeals together in a perfectly coherent hole.  He’s the only director I know who could have me sit for hours in a cool theater and walk out sweating.

He commented that Green Zone wouldn’t appeal to everyone, and there’s no doubt it doesn’t suffer from the puppy-dog desire for universal appeal that dooms many mainstream features.  It doesn’t indict George W. Bush, but assumes that America was duped by a few powerful men who wanted an excuse to remove Saddam Hussein.  That’s hardly the kind of material upon which most war films are based, but the applause that greeted the credits at my showing reveals not just the film’s execution but also how much we’ve changed since 9/11 generated overwhelming pro-military, pro-Bush support.

Green Zone achieves entertainment first and foremost, but there’s a point, there’s always a point for Damon and Greengrass, as there should be in nearly every movie.  As Damon talks to Ryan’s befuddled report or Kinnear’s look-the-other-way bureaucrat about why we went to war, you can feel the discomfort in the audience and the way it relishes that aforementioned line.  Damon and Greengrass are bumming me out by hesitating to sign up for another Bourne flick; but if they keep churning out films like this one, I might not mind.