New Body of War

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Alexandra, and Body of War

by Matt Prigge

Among the last directors you’d expect to make a straight-up antiwar parable is Alexander Sokurov, of the single-shot art-house hit Russian Ark and less overtly gimmicky experiments like Mother and Son. It’s a little like expecting a protest album from Brian Eno. Sokurov does textures, not polemic, and his work often exists in a vacuum—or in Russian Ark’s case, a 3,000-year-spanning time warp. It’s not that Sokurov’s apolitical per se, though his films about Hitler (Moloch) and Hirohito (The Sun) more marvel over the alien qualities of these monsters than denounce them.

Indeed, Sokurov has stated he steadfastly believes, war or no, Russia should hold onto Chechnya, the subject of his antiwar film Alexandra. This conservative stance—though tempered by a respect for the Chechen culture and its livelihood—sneaks into a couple of dialogue exchanges, but it’s mostly superseded by his belief in the horror and mundanity of all wars.

Galina Vishnevskaya plays an elderly, rotund and perpetually fatigued woman who journeys out to the Russian-Chechen border to visit her grandson, a soldier who’s back at base between potentially dangerous missions. Her trip is uneventful. The biggest occurrence involves her schlepping off to the local market to buy cigarettes for the troops—a sojourn that gets further sidetracked when she meets a fellow grandmother, with whom she swaps bits of grandmotherly wisdom.

The message of Alexandra isn’t subtle: Vishnevskaya stands in for Mother Russia, looking out of place in barren, Muslim-dominated Chechnya. And yet a handful of not-so-light speeches aside, Sokurov isn’t trying to speechify so much as wallow in the melancholy of life with war. Vishnevskaya is one of her homeland’s premier opera divas, and while she’s never called upon to demonstrate her vocal prowess—in fact, she rarely rises above a barely detectable guttural mumble—Alexandra itself remains musically driven.

Though Sokoruv has nixed his sometimes notorious long takes for more traditional shot lengths, Alexandra still feels like a filmic symphony, with the film draped in mournful classical music that often feels divorced from what’s on-screen—never driving the action but always there to comment on it. In the end, though, Alexandra, with its lightly forceful message, smacks of an artist struggling to find the right mix between art-house appropriate and his own less accommodating style.

Ever wonder what happened to Phil Donahue? One might assume he stays at home these days, staring daggers at the television and cursing Oprah Winfrey for becoming a zillionaire cult leader by stealing his talk-show format, but actually he and co-director Ellen Spiro have helmed this month’s Iraq War documentary nobody is going to go see.

On one hand, Body of War tells the undeniably compelling story of Tomas Young, a patriotic young man who enlisted on Sept. 13, 2001 with dreams of bringing bin Laden to justice. He wound up shot in the back and paralyzed after just five days in Iraq.

The film’s finer sequences show Young traveling cross-country to various antiwar rallies, including Cindy Sheehan’s notorious Crawford, Texas, vigil. Even the unfortunate Eddie Vedder songs, which klutzily sing out exactly what we’re seeing on the screen, don’t detract too much from the powerful statements of Young and his fellow members of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Alas, Donahue and Spiro aren’t content with the human story. They’re also trying to hand down an indictment. Massive chunks of screen time are devoted to the eerily repetitive 2002 congressional arguments for the war, with the same heightened, fear-mongering rhetoric parroted across party lines.

Touchingly, West Virginia Sen. and former Ku Klux Klansman Robert Byrd finds some scrap of redemption in his attempted filibuster, a frail and trembling cry for common sense drowned out by the saber-rattling doomsaying of his peers.

Byrd’s speech is far more effective than Body of War’s goofiest structural conceit—we’re constantly interrupted by screen-spanning, giant-print graphics ticking off the names and party affiliations and states of senators who voted for the war, one after another …

The filmmakers would’ve been better served staying closer to Young, as it’s impossible not to be moved by his daily awful struggle with his injury.

A squirm-inducing, ultimately humorous scene in which young’s mom helps him with his catheter is as transcendent a depiction of a mother’s love as I’ve seen on-screen. Donahue and Spiro should’ve spent more time exploring these wonderful human moments and much less time browbeating us with stuff we already know.

Not Reviewed

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