For Americans sitting in cinemas watching the summer’s fun movies, such as The Simpsons and Hairspray, the trailer for Lions for Lambs is jarring and unexpected. It opens with a moody shot of the Washington Memorial, and shifts to a series of quick-fire scenes about President George W Bush’s ”war on terror”.
Lions for Lambs, scheduled for release in the United States on November 9, is not a documentary nor an art house film nor even a Michael Moore-style piece of agitprop. It is mainstream Hollywood, starring Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, who also directed it. It is one of about a dozen Hollywood films due for release or being made that deal with the US divided, the national debate over Iraq and Afghanistan, and other consequences of 9/11.
This is a departure for Hollywood. During World War II, there were almost no films made other than propaganda ones. The same happened during Vietnam: it was three years after the fall of Saigon before filmmakers felt brave enough to make explicit anti-war movies — Mash hid its colours behind humour and a previous war.
Jerry Sherlock, director of the New York Film Academy and executive producer of movies including The Hunt for Red October, welcomed the prospect of movies coming out while wars were being waged. ”I think it is great because films do influence people. I hope that the films coming out influence people. The truth sets us free, after all the bullshit that we get every day in Washington and the airways and Cheney … I am surprised it has taken so long,” he said.
Lions for Lambs interweaves the stories of two American students who end up in Afghanistan, their idealistic professor, a senator and a journalist. The trailer shows Cruise, who plays the senator, in his office on Capitol Hill shouting at the journalist, Streep: ”Do you want to win the war on terror? Yes or no? This is the quintessential yes or no question of our time.”
The films are bound to be politically controversial, particularly coming in the run-up to next year’s presidential election. American conservatives, without having seen it, have begun vilifying Lions for Lambs as anti-war propaganda.
Other films on the way include Rendition, with Reese Witherspoon as the wife of an Egyptian chemical engineer spirited away for interrogation by the CIA. In the Valley of Elah, due for release on September 14, is directed by Paul Haggis, and stars Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon. It is about post-combat stress and is based on a real incident in which a soldier was murdered while on a drinking spree with his comrades on return from Iraq.
That, too, has already run into trouble. Dennis Griffee, national commander of the Iraq War Veterans Organisation, refused to help after learning that Sarandon, an anti-war critic, was involved.
Grace is Gone, due out in October and directed by James Strouse, looks at the impact on a family of the loss of a wife and mother killed in Iraq, while Kimberly Peirce’s Stop Loss, scheduled for release next March, deals with a veteran who refuses to return to Iraq. Redacted, to be released in December, is directed by Brian de Palma and is about US soldiers persecuting an Iraqi family.
The Hurt Locker, on which filming is due to begin this week in Jordan and Kuwait, is written by Mark Boal, who also worked on In the Valley of Elah. The Hurt Locker concentrates on a US army explosives disposal unit in Iraq.
”It’s the first movie about the Iraq war that purports to show the experience of the soldiers,” Boal, a former journalist, told the Hollywood Reporter from location in Jordan. ”We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can’t see on CNN.”
He added: ”Most war movies don’t come out until after the war is over. It’s really exciting for me, coming out of the world of journalism, to have a movie come out about a conflict while the conflict is still going on.”
Hollywood is normally averse to risk but it may have decided the public mood is anti-war and unlikely to change. Darrell West, who specialises in politics and the mass media at Brown University, Rhode Island, said: ”I think the outpouring of movies reflects the widespread public disenchantment with the war. It took longer with Vietnam.”
One factor that is different from Vietnam is 24-hour news. ”The news cycle is definitely faster now than it was 40 years ago, so when bad things happen, they definitely become aware of them very quickly,” West said.
In the past, many war movies were sanitised because they relied on the Pentagon to provide equipment and extras and the Pentagon in return often asked for a degree of control over scripts.
David Robb, the Los Angeles-based author of Operation Hollywood, which investigated the relationship between filmmakers and the Pentagon, is sceptical about whether the films will find a market or even get made. ”I think it is impossible to sell an unpopular war while it is going. People go for entertainment. We will see how many get made and how many get distributed and how many get military assistance,” he said.
But while movies such as Top Gun required the help of the Pentagon, most of the present batch of movies do not involve large set pieces or require aircraft carriers or tanks and have been made independent of the military.
Sherlock believes making films while conflicts are ongoing is positive, not least because ”this war is lasting longer than World War II”. ”I think there are things we did not find out about the Vietnam war until after. I think now the American public is much more advanced. There are fairly few people saying our flag is right or wrong,” he said. — Â