Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The season's first smash documentary shows why the war we're seeing looks so different overseas. Plus: A remarkable movie about being crazy, from someone who should know.
May 27, 2004 | Truth, lies and "Control Room"
Last weekend, when it opened at New York's Film Forum, Jehane Noujaim's documentary "Control Room" sold out every seat at every screening, breaking the legendary Manhattan cinema venue's single-screen box-office record. This might not directly reflect the film's merits, although "Control Room" is a surprising, puzzling and in many ways brilliant work. Rather, these packed houses for a documentary about an Arab TV channel speak to the intense public hunger (at least in some quarters of our society) for alternate sources of information about what the hell happened in Iraq over the last year and a half, and for ways of thinking about it that don't spring from prejudice or pure propaganda. (Cough-cough-New York Times-cough-cough-cough.)
Improbable as it seems, "Control Room" looks like the season's smash documentary, at least until Michael Eisner and Harvey Weinstein get their act together and figure out who's going to distribute Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11." Noujaim, an Arab-American woman who grew up shuttling between Egypt and the United States, spent the months surrounding the "major combat operations" in Doha, Qatar, traveling the 20 miles back and forth from the studios of Al-Jazeera, the semi-notorious Arabic-language news channel, to CentCom, the complex where the U.S. military dispensed approved information to the world press. What makes the movie so good is the fact that what she sees is never precisely what you expect. Sure, Noujaim is clearly more sympathetic to Al-Jazeera than, say, Donald Rumsfeld is (the defense secretary's live-from-Mars press conferences serve here as a kind of dark comic relief), but you never get the feeling she's pursuing some simplistic Arabs-good, Americans-bad story line.
In fact, if anything characterizes the protagonists who gradually emerge from the stew of names and faces in "Control Room," it's how complicated and conflicted they all are. Hassan Ibrahim, the cuddly-bear ex-BBC reporter who is Al-Jazeera's main man at CentCom, speaks contemptuously of the cowardice and conspiratorial thinking of the Arab world, and says he believes the U.S. Constitution and the American people will ultimately restrain the Bush administration's imperialist urges. Senior producer Samir Khader, a sad-sack middle-aged chain smoker with a bad Rudy Giuliani combover, seems like more of a pro-Arab ideologue -- until he announces that if Fox News were to offer him a job, he'd take it. (Anything to get his kids into American universities and trade "the Arab nightmare for the American dream.")
In Noujaim's portrait, Al-Jazeera's correspondents seem genuinely divided between their commitment to Arab nationalism (albeit an idealistic, democratically minded version of it) and the so-called objectivity demanded by news reporting. One young female Al-Jazeera producer finds herself close to tears at seeing American tanks in the streets of Baghdad. "Where is the Republican Guard? Where is the Iraqi army?" she exclaims in disbelief. "They must be somewhere." Yet the CentCom correspondents from CNN, MSNBC and Fox are not much closer to the journalistic ideal of impartiality, Noujaim suggests. We watch as they stand around and cheer the semi-staged toppling of the Saddam statue, or obsequiously thank a military spokesman for providing details (subsequently discredited, of course) of the Jessica Lynch rescue.
