Gunner Palace
is war without the special effects.
For most Americans, particularly those of us without loved ones in the armed services, our perception of the ongoing war in Iraq is shaped entirely by what we see on the evening news, in newspapers and documentaries from embedded filmmakers.
Gunner Palace
looks inside the soldiers' experience in Iraq, giving us yet another way to view the war.
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It's a sick, funny, thoughtful and scary film about real men and women fighting half a world away from home.
Filmmaker Michael Tucker took his camera to a bombed-out former weekend party palace for Saddam Hussein's son, Uday, to film American soldiers at work and play. Nicknamed "gunner palace" after the 2/3 Field Artillery squad stationed there, the palace is, in the words of one of the soldiers, "an adult's paradise" with fancy furniture, a large swimming pool and newly installed putting greens to fill the time between mortar attacks. Tucker's lens captures these soldiers, some fresh out of high school, as they patrol the streets of Baghdad, raid the homes of suspected insurgents and count the days until they go home.
Though he narrates throughout the film, Tucker stays behind the camera, allowing the soldiers to shape the story. He finds a star in SPC Stuart Wilf, a wisecracking guitar player from Colorado Springs. Through most of the film, Wilf comes off as a lovable jackass, proudly displaying a T-shirt that reads, "My Ass Stinks Like Shit" and goofing off
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with a machine gun in his hands. In a series of interviews near the film's end, though, Tucker asks Wilf how he rationalizes taking a human life and the jokester suddenly disappears. "You can't rationalize someone losing a child," he says. It's the defining moment of the film.
The gravity of the situations these soldiers face isn't lost on any of them, despite their young ages and sometimes, in the case of Wilf, foolish behavior. Tucker shows this in scene after scene without creating a political manifesto in support of any particular agenda. The film is, of course, political by nature, but Tucker makes no outright rallying cries or hamfisted efforts to tempt the audience to tears; he lets the footage speak for itself. The film doesn't come out and say, "This war is wrong" or try to persuade us President Bush is a liar, but it does make one thing abundantly clear-Tucker is decidedly pro-soldier.
Every day we're bombarded with dozens of different views on Iraq from politicians, writers and filmmakers from all ends of the political spectrum, all purporting to be accurate. Films like
Gunner Palace
remind us that no matter whom we choose to believe, when it comes to this war, we just want it over.
