Unconventional Warfare
By RICHARD SCHICKEL
The soldiers burst through the underground bunker's door, safeties off, trigger fingers tense. If the purloined gold--some $23 million worth--is anywhere, it's likely to be here--heavily, nervously guarded.
They are somewhat nonplussed by what greets them. Someone is watching the Rodney King drama unfold on cable TV, while someone else listens to an Eddie Murphy hit and another works out on a NordicTrack. One of the defenders makes a placatory gesture, offering the intruders a Cuisinart. Down the hall, a captive is being tortured by electric shock, his tormentor chatting amiably with him in American slang between jolts.
The invaders have, as David O. Russell, who wrote and directed Three Kings, says, "fallen down the rabbit hole" into one of modernism's most disturbing places, where calculated brutality and mindless consumerism exist side by uneasy side, a place where a life may not be judged a fair trade for a Rolex. They are also, as Russell later recalls, part of a sequence "we were not going to finish before lunch." A producer worried about the budget suggested he "broom out" some of the details and move on. But the film's star, George Clooney, stood fast. It was scenes like this that had induced him to cut his price in order to make the picture. Besides, Russell was certain that back in Burbank he had Warner Bros.' support. One of its senior executives had told him that if he couldn't occasionally green-light a movie like this one, he didn't want his job.
There are not, however, too many current movies like Three Kings--except, perhaps, in crude outline. On that level, it sounds like dozens of other interchangeable action-adventure scripts. In the aftermath of a war--in this case 1991's Desert Storm--three American soldiers discover a treasure map (you don't want to know where the enemy soldier hid it) that holds the secret of where the Iraqis have stashed the gold they stole from Kuwait. Our heroes set out to find it. In the course of their journey they encounter members of the Iraqi resistance who have been abandoned by President Bush's policy. Eventually the squad--besides Clooney it includes Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube and rookie Spike Jonze as their sidekick--must choose between greed and helping their new friends escape Saddam's clutches. That choice is pretty much a no-brainer. The End.
Except story is not the end of this movie. It's a beginning, a pretext, for what is, finally, a brilliant exercise in popular but palpable surrealism. The film has the bleached look of a carelessly shot videotape, with, occasionally, what Russell calls "very intense hits of color"--a Bart Simpson doll is one of them--burning through its low-contrast surface. This is how combat appears to us in the new technological age--no terrible beauty, just absurdity's flat, deadly record keeping.
That visual manner grounds the film in harsh reality, reminding us that as funny as this movie often is, deadly issues are at stake in it. Two G.I.s carry on an intensely muttered argument over whether it is Lexus or Infiniti that carries a convertible in its product line, a discussion that is finally settled when they come upon a cache of such high-performance cars--including a stretch limo--in the middle of the Iraqi nowhere. Before that happens, though, we see Iraqi troops casually murder a mother in front of her husband and young daughter. We also hear a U.S. soldier being taught the difference between gold bullion and the cubes you make soup from. A pair of Iraqis avow that the U.S. is the Great Satan, but that does not prevent them from dreaming of becoming hairstylists there. Of course, they first have to dodge the footballs the Americans have wired with high explosives capable of knocking a helicopter out of the sky. But for all that, when a scoop-needy television reporter (Nora Dunn) insists that her stories, unlike those of a younger, cuter rival, are "substance-based" not "style-based," she could be describing this movie.
"Multilayered" is Russell's modest term for it; "genially bizarre" is the phrase that springs to a bedazzled critic's mind. Also, curiously enough, engagingly retro. For the 41-year-old director is a child of the '70s, who sees movies like MASH and Shampoo as models for the juxtaposition of serious issues and tossed-off comedy in contexts that keep the audience from settling into either mode.
Russell says he was also influenced by novelist Robert Stone, who was writer-in-residence when he was attending Amherst (class of '81)--so much so that he spent time in postrevolution Nicaragua seeking out the realities behind Stone's A Flag for Sunrise. He found them. "You'd be playing baseball or listening to an old Michael Jackson record and hear a gunshot. You wouldn't know if it was the contras arriving or just some guy who'd run a red light."
Obviously that experience influenced Three Kings. But Russell honed his transgressive chops with a couple of smart, sly independent comedies: Spanking the Monkey (about, of all things, incest) and Flirting with Disaster (about a man trying to find his long-lost birth parents). They were both chamber satires, on nowhere near the symphonic scale of Three Kings, which required a year and a half for Russell to research and write--sometimes nervously.
"I didn't want to spend 18 months writing this and then be sent away," he says. That didn't happen. Instead, as they used to do in the days of the movies Russell admires, a major studio risked major money (around $50 million) on what remains a film of determinedly independent sensibility.
We keep meeting the enemy on our various peacekeeping missions and discovering that he is very like us--wearing our sneakers and T shirts, lusting after our music, our gadgets, our more deadly hardware. As Russell notes, the son of Slobodan Milosevic even has an American-style amusement park up and running in what's left of the former Yugoslavia. This is not exactly what people mean when they talk about the American Century. But that's the way it has worked out. And David Russell has written its epitaph in blazing, user-friendly fire.