‘Kings’: Iraq war primer?

When David O. Russell’s film “Three Kings” came out in 1999, Warner Bros. marketed it as a rock ‘n’ roll boys’ action feature. But the tale, set in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, is a commentary on what Russell terms a “morally complicated war and morally compromised war.”

Today, against the backdrop of another complicated conflict in the region, Russell considers “Three Kings” a crash course in “Iraqi Insurrection 101.” His film, he said, exposes a concept essential to analyzing subsequent events: “We saved a rich country that was not a democracy, and we did not help the country that was trying to have a democracy rise up.”

As “Three Kings” opens, four bored American GIs -- “victors” though they never saw combat -- slip into Iraq after the war is over to steal back gold Iraqis have stolen from Kuwaitis. The renegade Americans -- played by George Clooney, Ice Cube, Mark Wahlberg and Spike Jonze -- intend their illicit raid to be quick and simple. But the Shiite villagers -- in the midst of a failed insurrection -- regard them as saviors to protect them from Saddam’s soldiers. And things get messy for the Americans.

The Americans burst into a bunker where they think the gold is sequestered, surprising Saddam’s soldiers who are watching the Rodney King beating on CNN. The startled Iraqis try to mollify the Americans with some of their Kuwaiti loot: a Cuisinart, a mini-stereo. In the next room, an Iraqi rebel is being tortured.

This is the combination of chaotic action, emotional content, pathos and absurdity that drives Russell’s film.

The concept for “Three Kings” came from novelist-screenwriter John Ridley, who wrote its original script and gets story credit. Reached by phone in Toronto, where he is now shooting a film, Ridley said his protagonist (eventually played by Clooney in the Russell script) was a black man. And the issues that interested him have a contemporary resonance.

“At the time of the Gulf War,” he said, “many black soldiers joined because it was a way to subsidize college, education, learning. They never expected to find themselves overseas fighting a war against other people of color.” Ridley’s main character asked the questions, “Why am I here? Why am I serving?” But that focus changed, Ridley said, “when the character changed.”

Russell, then fresh from the success of his “Flirting With Disaster” (1996), signed on to direct after seeing a description of Ridley’s script, which had been languishing at Warner Bros. Seeing a story set in a war not yet depicted on film, Russell realized he could work with “the secret history -- the history that hadn’t been officially played in the media.” Russell took 18 months to write his own script.

Perceptions of the war were shaped by CNN, as well as some of the first color photographs of a war, and Russell drew on both as inspiration for the surreal look of his film -- saturated candy colors (Bart Simpson on the grille of a jeep; a bright pink toy football thrown up against a blue sky) that pop out against the deep, bleached expanse of desert. Another inspiration was photojournalist Gilles Peres’ book “Telex Iran,” filled with black-and-white photos of a flat, open, impoverished desert landscape. “This was the world and the energy that interested me,” Russell said.

He and the film’s production designer, Catherine Hardwicke, planned a research trip to Iraq in the summer of 1998. “But then terrorists blew up the embassies in Nairobi and Clinton started bombing Iraq, and it wasn’t worth it anymore. Catherine did contact this guy who was walking around the world carrying an 8-foot-tall crucifix on his back in some kind of performance art for peace or something. He had been allowed to walk into Iraq carrying his cross. He took all kinds of photographs inside Iraq that we got hold of, which gave us lots of ideas for costumes and architecture and vehicles.”

Some critics praised the film’s political core, but many found its experimental camera work distracting. “It was by no means a standard film,” said Russell, who said he wanted to shatter the action genre. “It was too harsh, too challenging to the widest possible audience. Given that, it did surprising well.” Made for $50 million, it took in $60 million at the box office.

Art met reality in 2000, when Russell traveled to the White House to screen “Three Kings” for then-President Bill Clinton. “Clinton said he thought that in addition to being ‘good entertainment,’ the film could be extremely useful in showing Americans how the war really ended and letting them know what’s really entailed in these interventions, so that in the future -- if it ever has to happen again -- people realize what is required to conclude a certain humanitarian intervention in a complete way -- without leaving a mess behind.”

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Antiwar stance

It’s possible to view “Three Kings” and conclude that Russell has made an argument for intervening now in Iraq to finish what was left undone in 1991. But any such conclusions were jarred by a recent visit to the director’s home on L.A.’s Westside. Taped to his front door is a poster proclaiming “No War on Iraq.”

On a recent morning, he took an hour out of his frenetic schedule -- he’s now deep in preproduction for his next film, which features Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman as a pair of “existential detectives” -- for an interview in his sprawling canyon house.

Russell, 46, formed his political views about U.S. foreign policy while a literacy tutor in Central America in the 1980s. The injustices he witnessed there, he said, “continue to stick in my craw,” and they echo through “Three Kings” and his views of the current conflict.

“While it may be ultimately justifiable to try and get rid of Saddam and create a humane government in the Middle East that could be an example to others,” Russell said, “it just seems to me so out of balance with the other things we’re not discussing ... our oil consumption, our support of dictators everywhere. Central America is still so poor, and they’ve been in the bosom of our ‘family of nations’ for over a hundred years. Where has it gotten them? I’m surprised terrorists haven’t come out of Central America.”

One accomplishment of Russell’s film is how it shows American soldiers transformed by their contact with individual Iraqis and their ancient Arabic culture. At the beginning of the film, the Iraqis are nameless enemies whom the Americans humiliate, stripping them on the battlefield after they surrender, referring to them with racist epithets. By the end of the film, the Iraqi rebels have saved the lives of the Americans, who then risk their lives to escort the Iraqis safely over the Iranian border. Conrad, the wounded Southern country boy soldier (Jonze’s character) wants to be buried at a Shiite holy site when he dies.

An intimacy with both sides shaped “Three Kings.” Russell remembers many of the film’s extras, who were cast from the Iraqi American community. One Iraqi actor was a bank teller in Phoenix. Two Iraqi twin brothers had actually lived through the Shiite uprising and trekked out of Iraq to the Iranian border, just as their characters do in the film. “They still had relatives in Iran in refugee camps,” Russell said. Another Iraqi actor lost an eye to Saddam’s torturers.

Powerful stories came from the American side as well. One of Russell’s military advisors on the film was Col. Jim Parker of the Special Forces, who was in Iraq when the war ended, Russell said. “He saw his soldiers crying as they had to stand by helplessly and watch Saddam crush the democratic uprising President Bush had encouraged, then failed to support.”

The renegade GIs of “Three Kings” think they can grab the gold, get out and return to their comfortable American lives unscathed. But there is confusion and surreal chaos. “The American soldiers are confused because they thought we were the victors and the good guys, and they have to stand by while Saddam Hussein slaughters his own people. The Iraqis are confused because we encouraged them to rise up in revolt and then did nothing to support them.”

At this writing, the statue of Saddam is toppled by Marines and Iraqis in Baghdad. A re-viewing of Russell’s spirited moral fable, however, might give some pause. There’s a long road ahead. The last time around, Russell said, “We had the yellow ribbons -- but did we really recognize that we’d abandoned a democratic uprising and left a mess behind in Iraq that would come back to haunt us?”