Gunner Palace
At the very least, it’s more honest and involved in its portraiture of American soldiers in Iraq than anything TV news of any political persuasion has given us. “I’m trying to make something that’s honest,” Tucker told an interviewer on the Web site Green Cine. “And soldiers have a huge hang-up about it. All they want is for someone to tell the truth. Not embellish it.”
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Yet the movie’s full of embellishment, most of it willful and self-conscious, and that distinguishes it just as much. Tucker makes room in the narrative for the soldiers’ street raps and amateur guitar heroics, their clowning and posing; each soldier seems to dip into his own mental library of pop culture to organize the strange and terrifying things happening around him. Tucker makes a concerted effort to be impartial in his depiction of the war, but by colluding with his subjects in their little fantasies, he’s produced an even more layered and illuminating account of people stuck in a misguided war.
Tucker and Epperlein are as susceptible to this as anyone, and in one instance they let it get the better of them: when the soldiers set off for a daring nighttime raid on a private home, anticipating heavy resistance to their mission of seizing a respected sheikh, the filmmakers dub in Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” filtered to sound like it’s coming off the speakers of the armored vehicles. A postraid pool party immediately calls to mind Robert Duvall’s beach bash in Apocalypse Now, and Tucker’s terse voice-over reaches for the coolly outraged tone of Michael Herr’s narration for the Coppola film. But by giving in to the fever somewhat, Tucker makes himself an even more sensitive receptor for the younger men, raised on hip-hop and reality TV. Black soldiers like Sergeant Nick Moncrief rap freely for the camera (a cappella, though in some cases beats and other instrumentation have been dubbed in later): “IEDs be going off while we gotta patrol / Shrapnel be ripping through your fucking skin and your bones / Got a soldier now, and he’s trying to put up a fight / But you really knowing he’s taking the last breaths of his life.”
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