Serious stuff

8/26/07

No End in Sight
Written and directed by Charles Ferguson

Charles Ferguson is a dot com millionaire and Ph.D. in Political Science who worked at the Brookings Institution. In his excellent first film No End in Sight, he lays out the decisions and planning (or lack of it) that went into the U.S. occupation of Iraq. To do this, he goes to the source--he relies on interviews with those who were directly involved (those who would talk to him, anyway) in Washington D.C. and Iraq, and some press members and soldiers. These people were not administration critics. Most were actually trying to implement the policies of the U.S. government. The bulk of the information in the film is not shocking news, and a well-informed viewer might already know or suspect most of it. But Ferguson puts the story together very effectively, and without editorializing, has made a film that is both compelling and damning. There’s something about having things laid out in an organized way, with pictures, that makes the story even more maddening, horrifying, and all sorts of other adjectives.

No End in Sight is certainly not standard summer escape fare, but it’s definitely one to see. It raises all sorts of questions, questions that need to be raised even if we don’t have the answers.

Video note:

The Lives of Others, the winner of this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, is now out on video. Probably a lot more people saw another nominee for the award, the Spanish film Pan’s Labyrinth, and were disappointed when it lost. But this one is good. It was written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (a very tall man with a very long name). The Lives of Others is set in East Germany in the mid-1980’s, before the wall came down. A loyal Stasi agent spying on a playwright and his actress girlfriend gradually starts to question why he is spying on them, whether they are guilty of anything, and the consequences of spying on the innocent. It’s beautifully acted, thought-provoking, sometimes funny, and ultimately hopeful. Check it out.

Both No End in Sight and The Lives of Others made TVOR ponder what it is to be a good person, and what the responsibilities of the dissenter are when those in power abuse it. Not what one normally thinks about in summer movies, but a few serious films mixed in with lighter fare is not a bad thing.