Screengrab Review: Standard Operating Procedure

Peter Smith — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:45:00 GMT

By Mike D'Angelo

In one sense, Standard Operating Procedure is anything but. Errol Morris has few rivals among documentary filmmakers, but he isn't renowned for tackling hot-button issues torn from yesterday's headlines; most of the folks who've sat down before his patented Interrotron camera have been either fascinating eccentrics (Gates of Heaven; Fast, Cheap & out of Control) or aging provocateurs willing to discuss controversies from decades past (Mr. Death, The Fog of War). For all its lurid notoriety, Abu Ghraib seems almost too ordinary a subject for someone as outlandishly gifted as Morris, and while he's done his usual formally sophisticated and journalistically thorough job, S.O.P. is the first movie he's ever made that gives off a faint but unmistakable whiff of déjà vu.

You know the players; you know the photos. Morris has secured interviews with five of the seven MPs who were indicted, including media scapegoat Lynndie England, and coaxed from them a disarmingly candid assessment of their behavior. Anybody who's read Philip Zimbardo's excellent The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil will be familiar with the film's unstated thesis, which blames the persecution and degradation at Abu Ghraib not on the moral lapse of a few "bad apples" but on a poisonous atmosphere created and condoned by those much higher up the military food chain. Still, words on a page can't provide the odd amalgam of shame and defiance that permeates these interviews, nor the dispassionate intimacy of the Interrotron itself.

What gets short shrift, surprisingly, are the photographs themselves. Some have been critical of Morris' decision to commission flashy animated sequences from graphics whiz Kyle Cooper, finding the juxtaposition of the sordid and the high-tech to be somehow unseemly. Those people should chill. But what I really wanted from S.O.P. — especially given the terrific essays Morris has been writing on the nature of photography for the New York Times — was an in-depth exploration of the bizarre disjunction between what the disgraced MPs (persuasively) claim they were feeling and their demeanor in the pictures. Sabrina Harman, for example, wrote letters to her lover at the time that powerfully recount her disgust at what was going on — so why do we see her grinning like a lunatic and giving a big party-hearty thumbs-up beside an Iraqi corpse? Morris asks the question, but he doesn't really delve, being too busy indicting the U.S. military as a whole. Thing is, we don't need Errol Morris to do that. We rely on him to look past the patently obvious.

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Dark Wind (1991, Errol Morris)

Paul Clark — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

If there's one thing I've discovered while writing this column, it's that When Good Directors Go Bad™, they usually do so in ways that are strangely compelling. While some of the films they make are merely small missteps and others are unmitigated disasters, generally the films will show enough of the director's style to be of interest as part of the filmmaker's oeuvre as a whole. Yet occasionally, a great director will make a film that just sort of recedes into the background of his career, insignificant even as a footnote to an important career. The Dark Wind, Errol Morris' sole fiction feature to date, is such a film.

The Dark Wind, based on a novel by Tony Hillerman, tells the story of Officer Jim Chee (Lou Diamond Phillips), a young Navajo working as a policeman on his reservation. Most of the time, he's assigned to relatively small duties, like staking out a road that's sometimes traveled by bootleggers, or keeping watch over a disputed well. But when Chee witnesses a mysterious plane crash while keeping watch one night, he stumbles onto the biggest case of his young career, involving murder, drug trafficking, dirty feds, and longstanding tribal disputes between the Navajo and Hopi. With help from Hopi deputy "Cowboy" Dashee (Gary Farmer), Chee tries to get to the bottom of the mystery.

The film's storyline is a pretty basic murder mystery, which aside from the Native American elements could describe thousands of movies. So what drew Morris to Hillerman's novel? When he was asked this question by an interviewer, Morris replied, "I did this for the same reason that everybody does everything in Hollywood: vanity and greed." Morris had had no small amount of difficulty in making his previous films — it supposedly took over two years for him to round up all of the relevant interview subjects to appear in The Thin Blue Line, for example — and no doubt an easy money project looked mighty appealing to him after that.

Trouble is, nobody involved with the film seems to be trying very hard, least of all the director. Morris, who has created some of the most visually arresting documentaries ever made, shows little facility at shooting a fiction film. The Dark Wind is flat and affectless, not in a rigorous way like a Robert Bresson film, but in a way that feels lazy and slapdash. The result is a movie with no style, no momentum, and above all no suspense. Strange, that the director who had turned a real-life case into an honest-to-goodness suspense documentary with The Thin Blue Line can't do the same with a fictional murder mystery.

The listlessness extends to the film's performances. At the time, Lou Diamond Phillips was at the tale end of his brief flirtation with Hollywood leading man status, and he gives such a recessive and uncharismatic performance in The Dark Wind it's easy to see why he didn't become a big star. Most of the supporting performances are forgettable, ranging from mediocre, like Fred Ward as the Lieutenant in charge of Chee, to the downright awful, notably Guy Boyd as sleazy federal agent Johnson. The one exception is the ever-watchable Gary Farmer, who plays his role with a casual charm that's sorely missing from the proceedings.

Of course, some of the blame for the film's failure should be laid at the feet of executive producer Robert Redford. Supposedly Morris had such a difficult time working with Redford that he left the project before it was completed. Some of the film's flaws can probably be chalked up to Redford's involvement, such as its ambling pacing. Other problems were mostly likely an attempt on Redford's part to salvage the project. I hope for Morris' sake that the awful voiceover was Redford's idea.

Yet I'm afraid the lion's share of blame must be given to Morris, who was simply never a good fit for the material. There are occasional touches that feel of a piece with the rest of his work — for example, a former carny who seems to be there for local color purposes until the Law of Economy of Characters kicks in. Mostly though, The Dark Wind comes off as a for-hire job, not unlike Morris' commercials for Miller High Life, but with less of a personal stamp. As Frank Zappa once said, Morris was "only in it for the money," and after a while even that ceased to be enough.

Fortunately, Morris soon made a return to the documentaries that have always been his forte. The next year, he collaborated with none other than Stephen Hawking on the film version of A Brief History of Time. This kicked off a fruitful period for Morris, in which he made his celebrated documentaries Fast, Cheap and out of Control (1997), Mr. Death (1999), and the Oscar-winning The Fog of War. His latest film, Standard Operating Procedure, premiered to Morris' usual enthusiastic reviews at this year's Berlinale.

The Screengrab : the fog of war

Screengrab Review: Standard Operating Procedure

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Dark Wind (1991, Errol Morris)