This review first appeared in slightly different form during the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. Operation Filmmaker opens in New York tomorrow.
As a portrait of post-Sadaam Iraqi youth, Operation Filmmaker doesn’t have the “wow!” factor of another recently released movie about Iraqi kids looking for refuge in American popular culture. But for a film that began life as a vanity project designed to document an act of kindness on the part of a Hollywood star, it’s a surprisingly evocative examination of privileged, well-intentioned ignorance. That director Nina Davenport chooses to resolve the story on a pat, inappropriately jokey note is thus maybe a fitting way to end a story of conflict between the self-oblivious and a master manipulator, but it’s still a disappointment.
In 2004, an MTV documentary featured a nine-minute segment on Muthana Mohmed, a twenty-something Iraqi with a passion for Hollywood film. MTV’s cameras followed Muthana as he toured a giant street market, searching in vain for cinema books; they captured a pile of bombed-out bricks, which Muthana said was once the site of a school in which he was studying film. Actor Liev Schreiber saw this documentary as he was preparing to travel to Prague to shoot his first film as a director, an adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Holocaust-memories-as-cultural-bridge novel, Everything is Illuminated. Schreiber decided to contact Muthana and invite him to come to Prague and work on the set of the film as an intern. Undoubtedly wanting a document of his own cross-cultural generosity for the Illuminated DVD, Schreiber hired filmmaker Davenport to trail Muthana and document his experiences on set.
Schreiber and his producer Peter Saraf undoubtedly went into the Muthana endeavor with the best intentions, but their cultural naivete is apparent from the outset. Schreiber says he wants to encourage Muthana’s filmmaking ambitions because “Baghdad needs artists”; Davenport lets the obvious follow-up question–– “Yeah, but don’t they need, like, safety, running water and electricity first?”––hang in the air unsaid. When Muthana chooses an evening of clubbing over working on an editing assignment, Saraf begins to doubt Muthana’s true ambitions. The producer notes that if he really wants a Hollywood career, he should be making himself “invaluable” on the set by making sure the actors never lack for coffee. But Muthana, who has never spent a night outside of Iraq or away from his childhood home, has no concept of the Hollywood ladder and has a hard time seeing how fetching snacks is going to teach him anything about filmmaking. The conflict is compounded by politics: both Schreiber and Saraf are self-professed “left-wing American Jews,” and both are visibly distressed with Muthana’s insistence that he “loves George Bush.”
As shooting on Illuminated nears completion, Muthana makes an impetuous declaration that he should go back to Iraq to be with his family, and to his apparent surprise, Schreiber and Saraf agree with him. But Muthana’s friends back home, who have been taping video diaries with cameras sent to them by Davenport, tell Muthana he should do whatever he can to stay in Europe. One of Muthana’s friends describes being virtually imprisoned in his home by violence, and unable to do much to entertain himself in between the frequent blackouts. Youthful petulance bleeds through the direness of the situation: if going outside doesn’t kill him, the boredom of staying inside just might.
Muthana eventually goes back to the producers and tells them that he can’t go home because local militias have threatened his family upon learning that Muthana has been working for American Jews. Davenport keeps the truth of the matter ambiguous: it doesn’t seem totally implausible, but Muthana’s employers write Muthana off as untrustworthy and assume he’s lying. Davenport doesn’t press the issue, but it seems likely that once Schreiber and Saraf realised that they could no longer count on being canonized as saints for rescuing the Iraqi Spielberg, Muthana’s fate no longer fell within the realm of their concern.
With his visa about to expire, Muthana makes a last ditch effort to ingratiate himself with a third producer, and lands himself a visa extension and a P.A. gig on the Prague set of Doom. Though her closest collaborator chooses to quit the project, Davenport sticks with Muthana and continues to build her portrait of a first-class manipulator with no qualms about taking advantage of white liberal guilt.
With the exception of Davenport, no one on these film sets really takes the time to get to know Muthana, and that amplifies his ability to serve as a projection screen for a wide variety of disappointments. Still, it would be impossible to call the guy an A+ employee–throughout, he shows himself to be far more interested in girls and drinking than in filmmaking, which, as the film goes on, comes to seem less like his life-long passion and more like his chosen hook for attention. Whether her subject is serious about the movie business or not, Davenport gives Muthana’s plight extra resonance by cross-cutting between footage of real-blood violence in Iraq, and scenes of Muthana on the fake-blood soaked set of Doom. Can you blame the guy for pulling out all the stops to stay in the realm where the piles of corpses are only make-believe?
It’s too facile to lump the director of this film in with the Hollywood types who blindly offer Muthana assistance out of liberal duty, and yet aren’t prepared to commit to a long-term mentoring relationship. But by focusing the final act of the film on her personal struggles with Muthana, the director makes herself a target. You do have to cut Davenport some slack: she’s been a constant in Muthana’s life throughout the course of the filming, and after many months of watching through the lens of the camera, she’s clearly frustrated with her subject’s never-ending series of bad and/or selfish choices. But Davenport also plays into Muthana’s bad behavior. Via first-person inter-titles, the director explains that “despite serious reservations,” while waiting and hoping that Muthana’s story would naturally evolve into an happy ending, she gave her subject several loans. This is a fascinating breach of documentarian/subject etiquette, and it’s to Davenport’s credit that she owns up to it on screen.
But not long after that admission, the film’s final title card seeks to neatly wrap up Muthana’s story with a glib rejoinder, which simultaneously reduces Muthana to a caricature of a nagging, unwelcome hanger-on, and positions him as a stand in for the whole of the Iraqi people. As Schreiber before her, Davenport seems to be projecting her disappointments concerning the entirety of the Iraq situation onto Muthana, thereby excusing herself from culpability in his individual plight.
It’s a puzzling turn in position for the filmmaker. Davenport is surely conscious that she encouraged Muthana’s narcissism by putting a camera in his face; she surely understands that his two options are to either go back to Iraq (where, whether because he’s been “working for American Jews” or just because he’s walking down the street, he’s got a fair chance of getting killed), or to milk the guilty generosity of Americans for all it’s worth. That’s a powerful concept, even if it doesn’t offer an immediate resolution. It’s frustrating that, rather than let that incredible conundrum say it all, Davenport felt the need to close her otherwise productively provocative film on an easy joke.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth