May 14: Restrepo (2010 -- Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger)

★★★★★

After watching Which Way is the Front from Here?, I decided to revist Restrepo to see if I liked as much as I thought I did and to see if some of the ideas in the recent documentary were, in fact, relevant to this film.  I did, and they were.

Restrepo is going to transcend many of the Iraq/Afganistan documentaries because it’s less about the specifics of the war than it is about the men pulling the trigger on the front lines.  This film isn't a critique of the rationale or conduct of the wars, and it isn't about the wars’ futility or the corruption of our nation’s profiteers.  Instead, Hetherington’s sympathy and his affection for his subjects – dwelt on in Which Way is the Front from Here? – create a compelling portrait of a group of young soldiers living together under unrelenting, life-threatening stress as the camera takes us through their moments of intense fighting and times of mundane work and play.  And this interspersed with moments of candid reflection, both in a studio setting as well as at OP Restrepo.

The candid moments are touching, as when the guys play guitars, work out, wrestle or recall growing up in a
protected environment.  They express honestly, in front of the camera, their anxieties about a patrol or activity before the camera heads out with them onto a hillside or village.  Their enemies are remote; the Americans don’t see their opponents’ eyes when they shoot at them, and incoming fire comes from far away. They respond to it with long-range weapons.   Death is only beside you in the OP, and the only blood you actually see is that of your fellow soldiers.  It’s a grim, hard, tense world.

With Hetherington and Junger embedded in 503^rd, Restrepo only shows us what the company sees.  Like the soldiers, viewers see nothing of the lives of the Afghans, and we watch powerlessly as military leaders talk to the Afghans like they are less than human.  One officer tells the local leadership to forget all the abuse that occurred under the leadership of the former officer, as though a slate of evident maltreatment could be wiped clean with a few glib phrases.  We see the fear on the face of another local who is suspected of Taliban alliance and, another time, we hear an officer apologize to a man after American forces have killed several members of his family, women and children.  His apology -- that we killed a lot of bad guys and that he’s sorry the man’s family was also killed -- underscores the dehumanizing gulf that exists between the local population and the men of the 503^rd, and  the situation bodes badly for America’s winning the hearts and minds of the locals.  But honestly, what else could the young officer say or do? 

Restrepo is mostly a vivid portrait of the comradeship that emerges between men at war, and the strength of the film is the tender, detailed soldier’s life that emerges.  But it’s also about war itself, the way postcard scenery is a field of battle and the way absurdities make bitter sense.  And it's for this amalgam that the film will last.