GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 4/23/08)

Errol Morris' idiosyncratic, sometimes mordantly humorous documentaries, which he's been making since 1980, have generally explored fairly obscure corners of (for the most part) American life. His debut, Gates of Heaven, was about pet cemetery culture; his 1988 The Thin Blue Line was a mind-bending real-life murder mystery encompassing a larger, even more mind-bending exploration of the nature of truth; his 1999 Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. was a creepifying, sleight-of-hand portrait of a mild-mannered execution-method-researcher/holocaust denier. Other pictures have tackled bigger, on the face of it, fish: his 1991 A Brief History of Time attempted a cinematic explanation of the theories of contemporary physics master Stephen Hawking, while 2003's The Fog of War offered the multi-faceted apologias of Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

But Morris' latest film, Standard Operating Procedure, is the first of his pictures of which it could be said "ripped from today's headlines!" S.O.P. is Morris' investigation into the scandal of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, abuse that was "documented" in thousands of photographs taken by American soldiers on duty there. I put "documented" in quotes because the film is also an inquiry into the nature of the photographs, and photography itself (something Morris explores to a lesser degree in some of his other pictures, and also delves into in his New York Times blog, Zoom). "Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out," Martin Scorsese has famously pronounced. The same is true of still photography, either fiction or non-fiction. Over and over again, Morris has his interview subjects — including several of the so-called "bad apples" (then-Secretary-of-Defense Donald Rumsfeld's phrase) who appear in the infamous photographs — to examine specific shots and give their accounts of what's actually going on in them. Is Private Graner really punching that Iraqi prisoner in the head? Who is standing by Lynndie England, out of frame, as she gives one of her notorious thumbs-up gestures above a hooded, supine, naked prisoner? Perhaps most chillingly, former Criminal Investigations Special Agent Brent Pack, who was put in charge of making a case against England, Graner, and others, goes through a whole virtual stack of shots and gives us the differentiation as to whether what's depicted in those shots represents actual criminal activity or so-called "Standard Operating Procedure." The overarching thesis here is, of course, that those punished for the abuse at the prison — the so-called "bad apples"— were in fact convenient scapegoats who were operating in a system that was rotten to the core, and sanctioned at the highest level. It's a thesis that's been put forward compellingly and disturbingly by two other films already: Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side and Rory Kennedy's Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.

Morris' approach — and often, his emphasis — is very different from that of the above-mentioned films. It's distinctly Morrisean, as it were, and seeing his style applied to subject matter with which one is already somewhat familiar makes one... well, question the style a bit. The blackouts, the jumpcuts within a shot of an interview subject, the variance of angle within a subject's explanation, the insistent, hypnotic music (this time by Danny Elfman rather than Philip Glass, who's been scoring Morris' pictures since The Thin Blue Line), the sophisticated graphics, the use of reenactments; at about the fifteen minute mark, I was thinking, "Does he really need all this artfulness?"

The answer is, finally, yes. Unlike Gibney and Kennedy, who frequently create montages out of archival footage to drive home their points, Morris works with a deliberately limited set of means: his interviews, data-conveying graphics, reenactments, and the photos themselves (there's one snippet of prison-recorded video as well). He doesn't use television footage to create "gotcha" moments for Rumsfeld or President Bush, although the two are clearly, by his light, indictable targets. But aside from helping him construct a remarkably compelling narrative, Morris' method has a subliminal message — it reminds you that he, as a filmmaker, is also manipulating this thing called "reality." It's his way of telling the viewer to never stop asking questions.

— Glenn Kenny