Usually, a film being shorter than you expect it to be is a good thing. It's a contradiction built until loving movies: The more you love them, the more you want them to be over sooner. (Or maybe love doesn't have to do with it. Maybe it's the more of them you watch, the more you want them to be over sooner. There are probably people out there who love movies but for whatever reason can only see one a month, and in their case, they probably wish they were double the length.)
Where was I?
Oh yes -- I usually like it when a movie is shorter than I expect it to be. Get out of there faster. Get on to doing something else. Or more likely, get to sleep at a reasonable hour.
But a short movie can also have a lack of weight to it, and that's what I felt when watching Shock and Awe, the third-to-last movie directed by Rob Reiner that I hadn't seen, which had its festival premiere in 2017 and briefly hit theaters the following year.
Oh that's not to say Reiner doesn't take this movie seriously. He takes it very seriously. It's about the George W. Bush administration's fabrication of evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to justify a military campaign and remove Saddam Hussein from power. It's the kind of thing we liberals were most aghast about, politically, before we knew the extraordinary depths of disgusting governance of which Donald Trump was capable.
But the movie is only 90 minutes long, which seems strange for that sort of film.
In the moment, I was very glad of its shorter length, mostly because I didn't think it was very good. But also for the reason stated previously, that I wanted to get out of there at a reasonable hour and go to bed. As it was, I fell asleep near the beginning, and didn't finish until 1 a.m.
But part of the reason I didn't think it was very good was that I knew it was going through these events in a cursory way. Or maybe just that these events didn't require more than a 90-minute movie, and perhaps devoting more than that to the journalistic efforts of some courageous Knight Ridder reporters and editors wasn't warranted. One wonders if their efforts were even worth memorializing in this fashion.
I have to say, part of my impression of Shock and Awe was formed by my sense of it as a technical failure. The lighting was terrible. But before I went off all half-cocked in blaming the director of lighting (a title that does not exist, and in fact, when looking this person up just now on IMDB, I couldn't figure out who was the best person to, um, not blame), I thought I should check to make sure there wasn't something wrong with the actual picture on my TV. And indeed, at some point since the last time we watched something on this HDMI port, someone seems to have dimmed the lighting, a surely inadvertent adjustment that I quickly corrected. I went back and watched a few moments of Shock and Awe and they all looked fine now.
But poor technique would have been true to my experience of the decline phase of Reiner's career. Although I don't recall having any technical issues with the last new Reiner movie I watched -- LBJ, which also starred Woody Harrelson -- I thought Being Charlie really looked like crap, and it wasn't a setting on my TV in that case.
It isn't a given that a director loses their visual instincts as they entered their 70s, which Reiner would have been doing when he made Shock and Awe. You can name numerous examples (Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese) of directors who haven't lost a step in that regard as they've aged. But Reiner in particular seemed to care less about how a movie looked and more about how it sounded, if you follow me, the older he'd gotten. I've noticed that even the opening credits seem a little bit tossed off in these most recent efforts.
He certainly has a good cast on hand. Harrelson is joined by the likes of James Marsden, Tommy Lee Jones and himself, in one of his final prominent acting roles where he didn't play himself or Marty DeBirgi. There's name value in the characters' wives and girlfriends, who include Jessica Biel and Milla Jovovich, who do a particularly poor job of rising above the level of the heroes' wives and girlfriends.
But the experience of watching this movie is kind of like watching a single political essay play out over 90 minutes, in which actors hand the baton from one to the other and speak a continuous stream of Reiner's thoughts. (Reiner did not write the film; that credit goes to Joey Hartstone.) That includes a lot of exposition and a lot of opinion. Opinion I agree with, of course, and that the facts have retroactively borne out. But nonetheless, something that's a bit dramatically inert, even though it's told in an efficient enough package that obviously moves from one point to the next with good momentum.
I think there's a real struggle to make us care about and recognize these people as individual characters. There are scenes of each of the leads, save Tommy Lee Jones, at home with a wife or significant other, reading in bed or having a beer, which are meant to humanize these men. See? They have lives outside the office, outside of trying to hold the administration's feet to the fire.
But these scenes feel really perfunctory, and they lack the instinct to add nuance to the portrayal of characters who are walking ideas. There's a moment that seems deliberately designed to give Jovovich's character more agency, in which she gets paranoid about Harrelson's character talking over their phone about the leads he's following regarding the government potentially lying to the public. She starts talking, without evidence and in a way that is never followed up in the plot, about phones being bugged and mysterious government figures who could come and harm their family. If you are going to introduce this sort of thing, you have to pay it off in some way, but Shock and Awe doesn't.
Obviously Reiner thinks of this as his All the President's Men, and perhaps because it was unavoidable, Harrelson and Marsden -- the Woodward and Bernstein stand-ins -- even evoke Woodward and Bernstein at one point in their discussion of what they're doing. That would make Reiner's character the courageous Ben Bradlee character. (I don't know who it makes Tommy Lee Jones, since I never totally figured out his character's role in the whole thing.)
Let's just say it's a pale, pale imitation of that Alan J. Pakula classic, which I am now evoking for the second straight day on this blog.
I'll start to wrap up here, but I did want to leave with one final look at a narrative choice that doesn't totally work. Even though the movie does largely get wrapped up in analyzing what the politicians said, when -- and they all appear as themselves in archival footage from the time -- it recognizes there needs to be a human face on this, and that human face is a soldier, played by Luke Tennie, who got paralyzed from shrapnel that severed his spinal cord after his convoy ran over an IED in Iraq.
Because so much time has to be devoted to chasing leads and speaking to sources who are surprisingly (and conveniently, and unbelievably) liberal with how much they reveal to the reporters -- liberal as in generous, not as in progressive -- this soldier can't really get visited with during the narrative. So it's really just a bookend, with the soldier testifying before a committee at the start, and finally, near the end, with us following him through training and into Iraq, where his accident occurs.
I guess maybe I'm just too jaded by the last two Trump administrations these days, but I found myself thinking "Is this all you got? A wounded soldier?"
Indeed it was wrong for the Bush administration to cook up evidence of WMDs that were not there in order to finish the job of removing Hussein from power. Whether it was actually Bush's intention to do right by his father, or whether it was just supervillain-style, moustache-twirling scheming for oil by Dick Cheney, is besides the point.
But through no fault of its own, Shock and Awe ends up feeling quaint if viewed in 2026. It feels like a luxury of a comparatively enlightened society that a phantom war was the only thing we liberals only had on Bush. (I'm sure there were other things, but I'm conveniently not remembering them right now.) By today's standards, George W. Bush was a model president.
As for Reiner himself, I do feel sort of sad knowing that this was his last truly political film that I hadn't yet seen. His staunch liberalism was something I always loved and respected about him, even if it didn't always make for the best movies. Even when he didn't hit the sweet spot between entertainment and politics, I appreciate that his voice was out there and that he was always trying.
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