Critic wrangle: "Battle for Haditha."

Friday, May 9, 2008 | 1:01 PM

Documentarian provocateur Nick Broomfield, of "Biggie and Tupac" and "Kurt & Courtney," goes semi-scripted in "Battle for Haditha," which portrays a real and ugly incident involving 24 Iraqi men, women and children, all civilians, who were killed by a group of United States Marines, possibly in retaliation for the earlier death of one of their own. Broomfield uses non-professional actors, many former military, in his film, which begs comparison to Brian De Palma's "Redacted" but is certainly getting a better reception from the critics. Certainly most see it as more balanced — New York's David Edelstein compares it to the multi-POV "The Wire," concluding that "even when the dialogue is stilted, the acting and directing take the starch out of it. Battle for Haditha has some of the raw energy of Sam Fuller's war pictures, which weren't subtle but left you energized by their ambivalence (there was no good or evil). It's a hell of a picture." "'Battle for Haditha' is a relentlessly exciting war film, unafflicted by moralism or finger-pointing, that leaves all the judgment to us, adds Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Which only makes it harder to bear."

For Armond White at the New York Press, the film's "greatest breakthrough comes from Broomfield unabashedly portraying al-Qaeda characters while the rest of Hollywood fears facing this reality--as if following the Muslim prohibition against portraying Mohammad... This taboo-busting is an act of humane imagination; that's what's missing from one-way Iraq War films that condescend or propagandize." Leo Goldsmith at indieWIRE finds that "it is the event itself -- and not how it is reported or misrepresented -- that fascinates Broomfield, and this is what distinguishes his film." Though he thinks that it "sometimes feels like an amateur remake of Jarhead," Nathan Rabin at the Onion AV Club declares that the film "ultimately derives much of its primal power from its bluntness and simplicity."

Others have quibbles: Anthony Kaufman at the Village Voice acknowledges that "[w]hen the shit finally hits the fan, though, the results are more emotionally bruising than many of Haditha's predecessors... Then again, the film's affective power occasionally bubbles over into the manipulative." And Manohla Dargis at the New York Times writes that the film, "though technically exemplary, falters dramatically on occasion, becoming dangerously close to overheated whenever the characters speak for any length."

{Photo: "Battle for Haditha," Hanway Films, 2007]