Philadelphia Weekly

Standard Operating Procedure
Directed by Errol Morris
C-
Reviewed by Sean Burns
Opens Fri., May 23

Renowned documentarian and master of shiny affectation Errol Morris has turned his attention to Abu Ghraib, sifting through the mountains of evidence in order to ... well, in all honesty, your guess at whatever he's trying to do here is as good as mine.

Following Mr. Death and The Fog of War as the third in what's been nicknamed Morris' "atrocity trilogy," Standard Operating Procedure once again finds the director far more interested in summoning ominous portent and experimenting with distracting film techniques than in any old-fashioned nonsense like conveying information. Each successive Morris picture seems to grow glossier and even more vague, pushing further into abstraction and incessant macro-lens close-ups of ham-fisted recurring symbols. There's also really annoying music.

Morris' interviewing style is less than rigorous. He tends to hang back and let folks pretty much say whatever they please without any bothersome follow-up questions. He talks at length to the disgraced soldiers who "starred" in the Abu Ghraib photographs, many of them fresh out of jail, most of them offering nothing but self-pity and lame excuses. Nobody even bothers to raise the million-dollar question: How the fuck did we allow this to happen?

Standard Operating Procedure's timing couldn't be worse, arriving just a few months after Alex Gibney's Oscar-winning doc Taxi to the Dark Side, which didn't just investigate the events of Abu Ghraib far more vigorously, it also explored the systemic rot and bureaucratic incompetence that made such a fiasco inevitable. Four years after the case was closed and the so-called "bad apples" punished, there are still plenty of unanswered questions.

But the only questions troubling Morris seem to be a lot of sophomoric blather about the nature of photography, prone as the film is to navel-gazing musings on the power of snapshots and manifestos about "the moment" that you'd be more likely to hear in a dorm room while stoned.

Everything in Standard Operating Procedure is just another prop for Morris' pretty pictures, which I guess may be part of some larger point he's trying to make about war, the camera's gaze and dehumanization in general. Whatever the intent, he's taken a dire, vitally important national disgrace and turned it into an art school project.

Within the first few minutes of the Israeli dramedy Jellyfish, the three plot threads we'll be hopscotching among are introduced at a wedding via a series of those bravura tracking shots where the camera follows Character A until they brush up against Character B, with whom we now suddenly tag along, etc. Don't worry--these brief, oblivious run-ins are as close as these characters will get to each other.

Less an Altmanesque daisy chain than a group meditation in a minor key, Jellyfish hunkers down in beachside Tel Aviv among the terminally lonely. So slow she's first seen telling a jilting boyfriend to come back several seconds too late, slightly dopey wedding waitress Sarah Adler (of Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique) abruptly finds herself followed around by a cute little girl who literally emerges from the sea. Filipino nurse Ma-nenita De Latorre, who speaks no Hebrew, finds herself in the employ of a cranky older woman who refuses to officially diagnose the language barrier. Meanwhile newlywed Noa Knoller breaks her leg while trying to escape from a locked bathroom during the reception and has to spend her honeymoon in a local dump rather than the Caribbean.

Very occasionally these plot threads will be in the same place at the same time, but their existence in the same area of the world at the same time isn't remotely as important as the fact that they share the same general depressive-funny tone. Married directors Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen spend the majority of Jellyfish finding gently quirky ways to portray their characters' melancholia. After Adler's boyfriend leaves in the opening shot, the aquatic blue background is suddenly revealed to be the side of a departing truck, leaving a miserable landscape to go with her new single status. Elsewhere Latorre's habit of always responding to her charge's pissed-off Hebrew with the same genuinely confused in-English declaration of "What?" becomes the best running gag since the broken horn in Little Miss Sunshine.

Jellyfish so nimbly maintains a delicate balance between giggles and neatly inscrutable metaphors--what's up with the title? what purpose exactly does the little girl represent for Adler?--it's a shame when the final minutes descend into magical realism and bona fide tears--crimes the film was doing such a deft job of avoiding. Mathematically speaking, though, 68 strong minutes out of 78 is nothing to sneeze at.

Ongoing

Alexandra
Director Alexander 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 superseded by his belief in the horror and mundanity of all wars. B- (M.P.)

Baby Mama
Amy Poehler is carrying Tina Fey's child in this Weekend-Update-meets-Odd-Couple-meets-Junior all-star comedy. (Not reviewed.)

Body of War
Ever wonder what happened to Phil Donahue? He and co-director Ellen Spiro have helmed this month's Iraq War documentary nobody is going to go see. C (S.B.)

Before the Rains
Produced by Merchant Ivory--still a trademark name apparently despite the 2005 death of Ismail Merchant--Before the Rains works a similar vein as the pair's Indian-set films. As with Shakespeare Wallah and Bombay Talkie, Santosh Sivan's film is just as awestruck over the environs as it is keenly alert to the prickly relationship between East and visiting (or in this case, occupying) West. B- (M.P.)

Spark the Chronicle:

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
The sequel to the film that gave us the SNL spoof that launched Andy Samberg's career features the battle over Narnia. (Not reviewed.)