Memorial Day
Directed by Josh Fox
At the IFC Center
Running Time: 91 minutes
Theres a difference between reflecting on modern times and exploiting them. Josh Fox’s strangely disaffected Memorial Day straddles
the line between both extremes. Harnessing the disorienting shakycam
aesthetic of home video documentation, Fox tells the impromptu story of
hedonistic partygoers in a Maryland
beach town adjacent to the local Army base. Several crude scenes of
intoxication and promiscuity later, the movie shifts to an Iraqi prison
base, where the same soldiers treat their foreign prisoners with
twisted versions of acts they previously enacted on each other.
Rabid sexual abuse, naked photography and forcibly attached hoods come into play as the victims experience a series of degrading torture schemes that nobody would mistake for anything but the misdeeds of Abu Ghraib. Fox obviously sees a parallel between the sins of those few bad apples and the grotesque sybaritism embedded in all of us. Sure, it’s clever; but is it art?
Better yet: Is it smart? Memorial Day displays major cojones with its graphic depiction of human brutality, but its in-your-face didacticism comes with loads of naiveté. Fox bases his central thesis around such a confoundingly simplistic conclusion—that the American soldiers responsible for degrading prisoners at Abu Ghraib did it and documented it because they enjoyed themselves—that the jarring nature of his experiment seems more like a juvenile act of punk defiance than a repudiation of the behavior at hand.
When I caught the premiere of Memorial Day at the CineVegas Film Festival last year, the slew of walkouts were impossible to ignore.The movie had its tiny army of passionate defenders—Variety critic Bob Koehler called it “a cousin to Full Metal Jacket”—but I simply couldn’t make peace with its ostensibly celebratory spirit.
“Where Brian De Palma’s Redacted was intellectually flaccid, Memorial Day has a raging boner for Abu Ghraib,” I wrote at the time.
Unlike Battle for Haditha, Nick Broomfield’s cautious depiction of unwieldy military violence against Iraqi citizens, Memorial Day doesn’t bother with the minutiae of character motives. Still, curious sorts with a high threshold for brash undertakings might as well check out the movie during its limited run at the IFC Center. Fox’s directorial debut is a strangely fascinating piece of misguided intentions, a crooked attempt to editorialize on the ugliest aspects of human nature gone awry.
