Ghosted

Rating: Null/10 (19 February 2014)

A film like this can be a profoundly troubling experience.
You know in advance that the US army aided the production, the filmmaker spent time with the SEALS in Iraq, the actors underwent weeks of military training, so it has much more verisimilitude than old westerns did about that time. The characters are not Dick Cheney types planning oil war on maps but rugged cowboys with a family back home, expertly trained to do a job. You take all their bonding and mastery of mind and apply to something completely senseless, killing. You have to juggle the fact it's based on recollection, that it's a film, and that some version of this, probably not far at all from what we see, did happen. You watch two hours of endless pain. You take in a revealing line in voice-over as our 'lone survivor' near the end muses something along the lines that 'brave men died on that mountain to uphold our feared reputation' and you know that it is in the end a reputation of fear. And you get to the end to see images of the real people with friends or in their wedding, just ordinary people, not Rambos, all this still ahead of them.
So even though the thing is simple, it elicits a complex response that I would rather confront than store away as propaganda or heroism. The fact is that it tries to perform a solid and precise job, as the men did, that the ugliness is both part of that world and gratuitous, war is, and that by its nature it dehumanizes. Did we need to see them throw themselves off cliffs like rag dolls not once but twice? But presumably that's what happened and that's how dehumanizing war is. We see them shelled and shot at, four guys against a hundred. A sense of injustice wells up and who are we to direct it against? They're fighting faceless Talibans, killing scores with a single bullet yet themselves surviving. But of course that's what the SEALS would see from their end, faceless enemies, and that's how deadly they are. And in retrospect of all that happens, the humane decision to let the Taliban goatherds go registers as woeful mistake, perhaps: they should have snuffed them. The film takes care to insert 'good' Afghans after all, a whole village of them, which also apparently happened.
We could say there's no need for a film like this, but then we have the parting images to remind us this is all part of the narrative of who some people are, the celebration of courage and sacrifice as substitute for loss.
Granting all this, there's still no room in my narrative for something like this. We enter the lives of some people in a certain moment in time to live through a certain revealing transition, it's what all films do. But history takes a few turns that you can inhabit and leave just bruised by blind necessity, nothing revealed beyond the fact that we can endure it. The real tragedy for me is evoked by the home video of a sergeant's wedding, a few seconds in the end credits, dancing with his bride, slicing cake and kissing, and it's such a tremendous waste that he should go half the world away to blow himself up and all the film can do is retrospectively celebrate a heroism.