Ryan McNeil
When I was young, I remember having a story book of Aesop’s Fables. As I sit and write twenty-something years later, I can remember many of them, not because of the morals they taught me, but because of the interesting tales I was told. The attention to storytelling is what has begun separating the well-crafted documentaries about the Iraq War from the poorly crafted ones. The world is five years into witnessing the conflict and by now most of us can agree that the war was a bad idea. So the challenge to filmmakers, as the smart-ass in me might put it, is to “tell me something I don’t know”. By paying careful attention to the story they want to tell, and not straying off-message, NO END IN SIGHT crafts a very interesting tale.
What I like most about docs like NO END IN SIGHT is how they make sense of all the strategic and political babble. They are able to boil it down and reduce it to layman’s terms which make it easier to invest in the story. It avoids thumping its fist on the podium and declaring “thiswariswrong!thiswariswrong!thiswariswrong!”, and instead focuses on what choices have been made since major combat ended. By speaking with the people who were put in charge of the rebuilding, we get a very clear picture of how things got so bad. As I watched administrator after administrator shake their head and confess how little they had to work with, it starts to feel like The Iraq War was a road trip taken without a map.
Any left-leaning documentary on America’s actions since the turn of the millennium automatically has to shake off the “Michael Moore rhetoric” label. Though I have lots of respect for Moore’s work – as anyone who is a fan of non-fiction should be – I can easily tell you, that NO END IN SIGHT primarily avoids finger-pointing and laying blame. It focuses its energy in telling the fable of a mission that began with precious little attention being paid to endgame.
It is indeed an interesting tale. Hopefully someone important hear the story, and will remember the morals it taught them.