Soldiers' Sacrifice

Restrepo Directed by Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger Runtime: 94 min.

"They’re gathering intel on how to deal with us," says Staff Sgt. Joshua McDonaugh in the war documentary Restrepo. He refers to the psychological complications of U.S. combat soldiers in the Afghanistan War such as the military and civilian society have not faced since Vietnam or WWII. That’s also Restrepo’s basic theme: looking closely at modern warfare through one year with Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade under constant enemy fire in the mountainous Korengal Valley.

Directors Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger claim no political perspective—except that their soldier-of-fortune brand of journalism derives from recent disillusionment about war. Embedded with Battle Company, their personally hand-held videography has impressive micro-telescopic clarity. Its immediacy practically boasts: "All this is what our frantically shallow commercial media ignores!"

Their unsentimental portraits of platoon life match harsh deployment to fast, gentle camaraderie. We see the irony of boyish innocence ("battle of the cherries") alongside newly mature discipline; the ruggedly beautiful yet hazardous terrain contrasted with the soldiers’ deep blue, deep brown eyes. And then there’s the red-bearded Afghan elders seemingly wearing eyeliner who want jihad or simply distrust Americans. Every shot deals with the ironies of consciously engaged danger.

An introductory scene of the soldiers en route to Afghanistan shows PFC medic Juan Restrepo laughing with his buddies. Dissolving from a brotherly duo close-up to the Afghanistan desert is a literary device--not simply journalism--that connects this doc to recent fiction films about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Fairer than DePalma’s accusatory Redacted and more like Lions for Lambs, Restrepo tries gathering intel (intercutting battle footage with soldier interviews done later at the unit’s base in Italy) that might prove emotionally useful in dealing with the phenomenon of contemporary warfare.

Yet Hetherington and Junger can’t avoid the new complication in which war malaise matches social malaise, military depression follows civilian indifference. Few movies outside documentaries connect us to the modern G.I.; Hollywood’s class bias trumps its professed liberalism. This is implicitly criticized in the film’s title: referring to the outpost named after the medic who is killed during an early battle, it salutes an unknown soldier.

Commemoration is part of Hetherington and Junger’s routine--quick observations of war and men under stress: A joyous moment of soldiers bouncing to the dance song "Touch Me." A soldier’s blood-soaked camos. The suppressed grief of Captain Dan Kearney’s command speech going from "Those that pray" to "make these motherfuckers pay."

Such a classic expression of human will shows the kind of wartime universality that The Hurt Locker denied its soldiers in preference of a misconceived, anti-war cynicism. Pre-Vietnam war films avoided such skepticism through their experience-based recognition of how men fight—superbly dramatized in Anthony Mann’s Men in War ([showing at Film Forum on July 15]). Restrepo moves away from the prevailing Iraq War cynicism, yet in trying to give its soldiers their due, the filmmakers don’t entirely avoid it. A sense of futility overwhelms the empathy that Hetherington and Junger discover.

"I was wrong, this war is gonna last a long time," Robert Ryan says with a sigh in Men in War, but his resignation isn’t nihilistic. Somehow, the sophistication of Restrepo withholds the undeniable gratitude that used to be implicit in every American war movie. Since Vietnam, anti-war movements have detached us from soldiers’ sacrifice. Their conviction and purpose have been further depersonalized by biased and trivial media (including the PSP video war game one soldier enjoys). Restrepo stumbles upon this problem while trying to answer it.