STUDIO: Sony Pictures Classics
RELEASE DATE: May 2, 2008
DIRECTED BY: Errol Morris
GENRE: Documentary
RATING: R

How do you tell a story that's still happening? Imagine the story of the Iraq War told days after Bush ridiculously declared "Mission Accomplished" or in the moments after the infamous tumbling of the statue of Saddam? The best Iraq docs have either recognized the ongoing nature of this dark moment in American History (like the amazing No End in Sight) or stuck with a specific situation with a beginning, middle, and end. The story of the horrendous torture, murder, and general violation of what it means to be human that went down at Abu Ghraib may not grab the headlines that it once did and it undeniably was a turning point in the international opinion of the war, but it's a tale that's still being written. The people who turned from soldiers to gleeful torturers have been scapegoated and vilified and, I'll admit, that's an aspect of what happened over there that has not been reported on nearly enough. But anyone who thinks the soldiers with their terrifying grins and thumbs-up poses deserve all the blame for the way the tide turned on Iraq is incredibly naive. This a multi-faceted story with new angles being revealed on a regular basis.

But there's also something not quite 100% right about saying "they were just following orders" either. They weren't. There's a gray area in between and that's what master documentary director Errol Morris tries to illuminate in Standard Operating Procedure, but it's an area that's still shifting and changing as more is learned about what happened outside those frame edges. Morris, a personal icon of mine, barely misses the mark with S.O.P. as he focuses his unique lens on a situation that has been overly simplified in the press but that the master filmmaker fails to illuminate that much more thoroughly than The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib or numerous articles already have.

In Standard Operating Procedure, Morris focuses his accomplished lens on the infamous snapshots that came out of Abu Ghraib in Baghdad and shocked the world. Morris asked himself, what is truly going on in these pictures? And what's happening behind-the-scenes and in the moments before and after they were taken? A photo only tells us so much and the most fascinating element of S.O.P. is how different elements of the famous photos of Lynddie England were emphasized over others. We all saw the young, female soldier smiling with her thumb up and THAT became the story, not the horrors going on behind her. Morris spends barely any time outside the walls of that awful place, giving us little background on the people there or much information about what happened after the sh*tstorm hit the press. Morris wants to know what brings people to stack naked men in a pyramid and put them on boxes with wires in their hands. He basically confirms a point that I always believed, which is that the soldiers at Abu Ghraib started their torture techniques at 11 on a 10-point scale and had nowhere to go but awful when they were asked to turn up the pressure.

More interestingly, he raises a fascinating question about the impact the photos had on the scene, not just later when the pictures were developed. One would assume that the cameras make people behave more intelligently and appropriately, but Morris makes the case, as do countless Girls Gone Wild videos, that the opposite is true. Yes, that's probably the first and last time you'll read a comparison of Errol Morris and the work of Joe Francis.

You have to give Morris points in one arena - the man has style. Especially in his recent films, he doesn't do anything in moderation and he uses ample amounts of slow-motion recreations and an oppressive score by Danny Elfman in his reenactments but S.O.P., like a lot of the war coverage, all of it starts to feel oddly repetitive and toothless. Several of the key players at Abu Ghraib throw out the card of "just following orders" and I firmly believe that the film would have been more interesting made a decade from now when those orders have turned to nightmares and hindsight has become clearer. There's also an odd sensation that, as well made as it may be, S.O.P. doesn't have much to say because the situation is still undefined. We already know everything there is to know...now. Ten, fifteen, twenty years from now, when the war is (we hope) over and the major player at Ghraib is out of jail and free to talk (he wasn't for this film) there's a story to be told. Even with an amazing filmmaker like Morris, it's impossible to yet fully focus the photos from Abu Ghraib and truly know what happened, who was right, who was wrong, and when it will happen again.