National Post (National Edition)
Shock and Awe
Rob Reiner’s filmography is full of riches — if you dig far back enough: This Is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride. Unfortunately, the entertainment industry’s motto has always been “What have you done for me lately?” and Reiner hasn’t done much of note. Shock and Awe, his follow-up to the lacklustre 2016 biopic LBJ, is a disappointing All the President’s Men/spotlight treatment of the early 2000s War on Terror. Reiner most certainly didn’t learn his lesson from last time, rehiring LBJ screenwriter Joey Hartstone to pen one of the most telegraphed Hollywood scripts in recent memory.
Woody Harrelson and James Marsden play Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, the lone American journalists to question the White House’s fraudulent claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — used to justify war against Saddam Hussein’s regime. While the rest of America’s mainstream media parroted the simplistic rhetoric of top U.S. officials, Landay and Strobel’s boss at Knight Ridder, John Walcott (Reiner), recruits retired, grizzly heavyweight journalist and Bronze Star Medalwinner Joseph L. Galloway (Tommy Lee Jones) to assist with their rogue coverage.
It’s a fascinating story when you consider that Landay and Strobel’s stories weren’t being picked up by most newspapers owned by Knight Ridder, because their singular status made the information unbelievable, at a time when investigative journalism has resembled an extinct profession. But Shock and Awe focuses on the wrong aspects of making that story interesting. Though it carries the spirit of fighting for the values of the fourth estate, the film’s sanctimonious tone about the irreparable harm of that war dooms the dialogue and sinks the movie to parody level.
This tone is evident from the get-go: a soldier’s (Luke Tennie) testimony at a veteran affairs committee introduces us to his tragic fate as a quadriplegic; he became a victim of an IED mere hours into his duty overseas, and he questions the necessity of war. Tennie appears to have a contemptuous, angry, yet blank visage by nature; this makes him a perfect cipher and symbol for the “American lives are at stake” message that became overshadowed
by the fear-mongering rhetoric against Muslims. Elsewhere, the likes of Jessica Biel, girlfriend to Marsden’s Strobel, and Milla Jovovich, wife to Harrelson’s Landay, support their partners’ efforts by questioning the logic of the government’s actions through heavy-handed monologues that would serve more realistically as debate between undergrads than the casual rapport of partners.
Biel’s character, for ex-
ample, delivers an overtly informative speech about the basics of Middle East tensions involving Iraq that sounds like a teacher’s lesson in a world-affairs classroom — but this is her way of flirtatiously impressing Strobel, who is so turned on by her basic grasp of international politics he quickly motions for the cheque.
The journalists’ run-ins with lower- and middle-level government employees, all of whom speak off the record about the behind-the-scenes manipulation of top-ranking officials, are equally prosaic. “I’m doing this because I’m an American,” says one government clerk, about her desire to speak to Landay and Strobel. That kind of earnest proclamation feels more wooden than real, and paradoxically dampens the demoralizing effect of learning of the government’s duplicitous actions.
The time frame between the Sept. 11 attacks and today has provided us with enough hindsight to re-examine the mistakes of that era, and enough fodder to create a compelling, gripping journalism drama, but perhaps the recent profusion of fake news has made it more difficult for some Hollywood liberal creatives, Reiner and Hartstone included, to write about the War on Terror with a more self-reflexive and objective lens — thereby ensuring that Shock and Awe fails to live up to its name.