Philadelphia Weekly

No End in Sight
A
Director: Charles Ferguson
Opens Fri., Aug. 10

The other day I was sorting through my Sicko-related hate-mail, while at the same time despairing with some friends about the future of the documentary format. Sure, there's a rose-tinted view that docs these days are indeed making more money than ever before, and scoring theatrical bookings that were unheard of 10 years ago. (Although reality television did more to break that particular stigma with audiences than it gets credit for.)

But when you've worked in movie theaters as many years as I have, you end up taking a dim view of things. Most semisuccessful documentaries tend to play exclusively to self-selected audiences, preaching to a choir that will happily fork over money so they can hear their own points of view recited back to them and applaud accordingly.

My biggest beef with Michael Moore is that he's not about to win over anybody who isn't already on his side. All the dripping condescension and ethically dubious generalizations that his fans so adamantly excuse only make these pictures instantly dismissable to the very crowd that might benefit most from the movies' messages.

Wouldn't a sober, nonpartisan recitation of inconvenient truths do more to win over hearts and minds? Are the silly music cues, cheap shots and hammy star turns from attention hogs like Moore and his annoying acolytes Morgan Spurlock and Kirby Dick really necessary to make a point these days?

Jean-Luc Godard once said the best form of film criticism is to make another movie, and so Charles Ferguson's astonishing No End in Sight has arrived just in time to show the agitprop crowd exactly how to open a productive conversation. With a marked absence of partisan editorializing and nary a hint of snark, this no-nonsense, just-the-facts-ma'am chronicle of our ill-fated Iraq occupation turns into a chilly autopsy of what might be the biggest foreign policy clusterfuck of our lifetimes.

I've never made a pronouncement like this before, but this is a film every American needs to see.

No End in Sight is all talking heads, facts, dates, timelines, eyewitness accounts and hard evidence--and it's absolutely riveting. There are no clownish pranks for the groundlings here, and the filmmaker refuses to grant himself a second of screentime. In fact, Ferguson doesn't even bother getting into that ever-shifting, endlessly debated WMD/Saddam/Al Qaeda/War on Terror reason-of-the-day for why we went to war in the first place.

Beginning with the "Mission: Accomplished" photo-op that'll forever live in infamy, No End in Sight zeroes in on a few crucial months back in 2003 just after Saddam was overthrown, and consults with the people who were there on the ground, presenting a coldly dispassionate overview of every bureaucratic botch-job you could imagine--and then some.

Crucial State Department reports remain unread by the executive branch, while all authority gets shifted to Donald Rumsfeld, who laughs and cracks to reporters: "I don't do quagmires." Experienced, dissenting personnel are consistently shoved out the door, making way for the unqualified Republican Party faithful--culminating in the almost Strangelove-ian anecdote of a recently graduated Georgetown coed placed in charge of reconfiguring Baghdad's traffic patterns. (Guess whose daddy was a bigtime donor?)

Ferguson first comes down hard on the rampant looting, during which an entire bombed-out infrastructure was picked completely to pieces, while our forces were ordered to stand by idly. Eventually Paul Bremer's crackpot de-Baath-ification process dissolves Saddam's army and puts thousands of trained soldiers out of work, leaving them economically adrift and unemployable, but still with full knowledge of all those unguarded ammo dumps. Does anybody wonder where the insurgency began?

Granted, this is all hardly unfamiliar material for anybody who reads the papers. But there's something breathtaking about seeing it all presented chronologically in such a cogent, brilliantly edited, bone-dry fashion. Honestly, there hasn't been a cinematic catastrophe of so many hack appointees in this deep over their heads since Spike Lee took on New Orleans in When the Levees Broke.

But where Lee's film flushed white-hot with anger, Ferguson remains seething, quiet and methodical. Narrated in ice-cold tones by Campbell Scott, No End in Sight doesn't need to editorialize. There's no wiseass commentary, incendiary rhetoric or stupid music cues. The situation and the participants (save for the ones who refused to be interviewed) speak for themselves, and this is the saddest, scariest horror movie I've seen in years.