Hollywood lines up a spate of films on Iraq war

Other coming films also use the damaged Iraq veteran to raise questions about a continuing war. In Grace Is Gone, directed by James C Strouse and due in October from the Weinstein Co, John Cusack and two daughters struggle with the loss of a wife and mother who is killed on duty.

Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss, set for release in March by Paramount, meanwhile, casts Ryan Phillippe as a veteran who defies an order that would send him back to Iraq.

In the past, Hollywood usually gave the veteran more breathing space. William Wyler’s Best Years of Our Lives,” about the travails of those returning from World War II, was released more than a year after the war’s end.

Similarly Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July, both stories of Vietnam veterans, came well after the fall of Saigon.

“Media in general responds much more quickly than ever before,” said Scott Rudin, a producer of Stop-Loss. “Why shouldn’t movies do the same?” He said his film was deliberately scheduled to be released in the middle of the presidential campaign season.

That impetus for immediacy is driving other filmmakers and studios as well. In October, for example, New Line Cinema will release Rendition, in which Reese Witherspoon plays a woman whose Egyptian-born husband is snared by a runaway counterterrorism apparatus. Paul Greengrass, the director of The Bourne Ultimatum, in which the bad guys belong to a similar rogue unit, is adapting Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book about Baghdad’s Green Zone, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, for Universal Pictures.

Brian De Palma’s Redacted, focusing on a US Army squad that persecutes an Iraqi family, is to be released in December by Magnolia Pictures. And Sony Pictures is developing a film based on the story of Richard A Clarke, the former national security official and Bush administration critic.

Among the new films, Valley of Elah is sure to be one of the most closely examined, thanks to Haggis’ credentials—he shared an Oscar for writing Million Dollar Baby and was nominated for another as co-writer of Letters From Iwo Jima—and because of his opposition to U.S. policy in Iraq.

“This is not one of our brighter moments in America,” Haggis said in a telephone interview from London, where he is still working on the film’s music. “We should not have gotten involved.”

Still, Haggis insisted that Valley of Elah was not intended to enforce his point of view. Rather, he said, it is meant to raise questions about “what it does to these kids” to be deployed in a situation where enemies are often indistinguishable from neutral civilians, and the rules of engagement may force decisions that are difficult to live with.

“The issues are similar to what a lot of us are coping with,” said an approving Garett Reppenhagen, an Iraq veteran who saw Valley of Elah last week at one of the first such screenings in Washington. Reppenhagen, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, helped recruit viewers for the screening.

By contrast Dennis Griffee, a wounded veteran who is national commander of the Iraq War Veterans Organisation, said he turned down a request to become involved with the film after learning that Susan Sarandon, a vocal opponent of the war, had a prominent role.

“At the very least it is offensive,” Griffee said of what he sees as a widespread refusal to acknowledge the troops’ pride at achievements in Iraq. He added that virtually every member of his platoon wound up in college, not jail, on return.