Craig Ferguson’s film on the Iraq war has been called a documentary, an exposé, and an indictment. In a way, it is all three. He provides many factual accounts from those involved in the decision-making, combat, and reporting of the war. He exposes the actions of several politicians and key planners, and, quite clearly, their mistakes. He then accuses such authorities of making a grave mistake that cost Americans and innocent Iraqis thousands of lives.
No End in Sight begins with a Donald Rumsfeld press conference in which he emphasizes that the war is simply too complex for most Americans to understand. In the following thirty minutes, Ferguson successfully disproves that statement with engaging insight into the mistakes that were made in the early planning stages of the war, most of them by Rumsfeld, Bush, and by the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), which was doomed from the start. The first act of the film is gripping, informative, and, above all, incredibly frustrating. I couldn’t help but want to get up from my seat, reach through the screen, and strangle some of the men on screen. Naivety, ignorance, and laziness are inexcusable characteristics of men making such important decisions regarding the fate of several countries, including their own.
As soon as I was good and fired up, though, the film encounters some major pacing-related problems. Edited by Chad Beck and Cindy Lee, the film begins to feel like endless successions of talking heads incessantly describing every mistake made regarding the war. By the end of the second act, the film had become so redundant and repetitive that I had been desensitized to any potentially emotional and frightening revelations later on. As the men on screen argue, though not directly to each other, about the proper terminology and sequence of events, Ferguson gets bogged down in a world of nearly incomprehensible information. Maybe someone who took a very keen interest in all the political and military details would be fascinated by these endless ramblings, but I was nothing more than bored by it.
Regardless, it is clear that Ferguson and the editors know what they are doing, for the most part. Narration by Campbell Scott, a severely underrated actor, is very well placed. He never just describes what we are seeing, but serves as a way to complement the images with new information. Most of the storytelling in a documentary happens in the editing room, and, despite the aforementioned issues, its pretty spectacular. When text is used to reveal information, the haunting score disappears, emboldening the usually devastating information.
Also remarkable is the way Ferguson refuses to make villains of Bush or Rumsfeld, a huge fault of Michael Moore’s
Fahrenheit 9/11. Sure he exposes their angering leadership in-capabilities and negligence, but he never proposes that they are the enemies. They simply made very poor decisions that had overwhelmingly tragic consequences.
No End in Sight provides plenty of information that will be new to most Americans in a way that is sometimes compelling but often times numbing. The biggest problem I had with it was, at the end, when Ferguson decided to tell the stories of some injured Veterans. It was not so much the way he did so as the effect it did, or rather didn’t have on me. I was so taken out of the film by all the stuffy politicians and experts that I could make no emotional connection to these victims of the war. Still, the incompetence he exposes makes the film worth seeing, if only for a dose of pessimism that will make everyone hope for nothing but an end. B-