Reviews
Documentary tribute to dead cocklepickers
Nick Broomfield has always been an intelligent documentarist. Unfortunately, his insufferable habit of making himself the centre of the story has deflected the purpose of some of his more significant work, giving it a parodic feel akin to that of the even more limelight-craving Michael Moore. However, Broomfield subtracted himself from the equation in Ghosts, his tribute to the Chinese cocklepickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay, and the result was a drama of acuity and authenticity. Wisely, he has adopted the same approach for Battle for Haditha, which focuses on a savage US Marine reprisal for a roadside bombing in Iraq, and, consequently, he has produced his most consistently compelling film to date.
Taking its docudramatic tone from Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1965), the action concentrates on several characters, prime among them stressed corporal Elliot Ruiz (himself a campaign veteran) and Sunni activists Falah Flayeh and Oliver Bytrus, who hide out in a housing estate waiting to detonate their IED. The locals trust neither side, but they're too scared of the terrorists to report the plot to Ruiz's patrol. Tragically, their silence is to cost them dear.
Broomfield makes interesting points about the invidious position of Iraq's civilian population, but most tellingly contrasts the levels of commitment to the cause between the occupiers and the insurgents. He also explores the notion that there is no real accountability in Islamicism, with even those who perish in failure being hailed as martyrs, while heroic Americans who breach the code of combat are liable to be tried in the media before they are court-martialled.
Yet Broomfield occasionally misses his step, with the vérité camerawork often looking choreographed and the post-massacre coda, in which Ruiz suddenly regains his humanity at the sight of widow Yasmine Hanani mourning her slaughtered husband, being unnecessarily sentimental.
He could learn some invaluable lessons from Stuart Cooper, whose 1975 realist drama Overlord has just been reissued. Steeped in the traditions of Humphrey Jennings, Peter Watkins and Kevin Brownlow, this exceptional study of a squaddie's route to D-Day had largely been forgotten, despite winning awards at all the major festivals. But it should now be installed among the great British films about the Second World War.
Reticent and ungainly, Brian Stirner makes an unprepossessing hero. But his bewildered progress through basic training and his grateful friendship with cocky Nicholas Ball invite comparisons with Paul Baumer in Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. Even his timid tryst with Julie Neesam at a village dance adds to the charming sense of ordinariness that makes his death before he has even set foot on a Normandy beach all the more shocking than anything Steven Spielberg concocted in the overrated Saving Private Ryan (1998).
But what makes this so memorable is the brilliant way in which Cooper combines John Alcott's delicate monochrome photography with footage gleaned from the Imperial War Museum archive to give the small-scale human drama a terrifying wider context that reinforces concepts of both the fragility and insignificance of life.
Jon Ivay ducks showing the battle he has so carefully sets up in Freebird. But the budget clearly didn't run to mounting even a miniature reconstruction of Braveheart and he had to settle for a Welsh Western that cribs from everything from Quadrophenia and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels to Easy Rider and Withnail & I.
If the magic mushroom sequences are anything to go by, Phil Daniels, Gary Stretch and Geoff Bell clearly had a ball making this adaptation of Ivay's stage play. But the enjoyment doesn't always communicate itself to the viewer, as Ivay keeps cutting away from the trio's befuddled drug deal to the turf war that is about to erupt between a gang of Essex bikers and the Welsh bruisers they blame for the death of their leader.
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