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If you haven’t yet seen “No End in Sight: Iraq’s Descent Into Chaos,” directed by Charles Ferguson, I recommend it (released on DVD October 30). Although by the end of the movie I felt more ashamed than usual to be an American. One scene in the beginning of the movie hit me hard. As I watched the sickeningly irresponsible Rumsfeld joke about Iraqis walking out of stores with vases (responding to questions about why the United States wasn’t acting to maintain the law and order it had obliterated along with Saddam’s government) while rampant, organized, destruction and looting leveled Baghdad, I confronted again the reality that this war is my legacy, our legacy, too.

The film’s central argument — the lawlessness, fighting, and misery that is Iraq was brought about thanks to the United States’ refusal to conduct thorough, informed war planning — is not a new argument. Many books have carefully documented the United States’ ruinous marriage of hubris and ignorance in Iraq (what Thomas Ricks calls the “worst war plan in American history”) and its many defining moments: Bremer’s fateful decisions; a war begun and continued without enough troops to establish law & order; the misspending and disappearance of war funds; the lack of attention to the seriousness of the rebuilding process, illustrated by the dearth of experienced staff assigned to Iraq; the roundup and interrogation of Iraqi men, which deprived families of their breadwinner and sowed hostility; the spread of opportunistic warlords propagating mass kidnappings and murders; and the unprecedented large-scale use of careless, violent, and unaccountable private contractors.

“No End In Sight” does, however, provide the viewer with a wider context from which to understand what has occurred over the last four years of US action and inaction in Iraq. The film creates the conditions that allow the viewer to feel as an Iraqi AND as US diplomats and military persons serving in Iraq. Using the stylistic tools of film, Ferguson brings together all the information we already know and gives that information an emotional context, a human face as it were, from which to apprehend the decisions and actions that shaped the war we have brought to Iraq and to ourselves.

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Happy Thanksgiving! I had a wonderful dinner with friends and then the traditional post-dinner Thanksgiving movie. This Thanksgiving the film du jour was I’m Not There (Kendall Theater). I LOVED it. Brilliant. Totally brilliant. Director Todd Haynes has transformed Bob Dylan into a contemporary Citizen Kane. Six actors play the elusive Dylan, with Cate Blanchett turning in a stunning performance (my favorite moment is her soliloquy in the limo. She turns to face the camera and nails Dylan’s penetrating gaze and then almost imperceptible slides from a mysterious Dylan stare into a perfect Mona Lisa smile). You don’t have to know a lot about Dylan to appreciate the film (one of the women I was with didn’t know anything about him), but if you have read his autobiography and seen the Pennebaker and Scorsese documentaries, and more importantly, listened to his music and followed his musical development, you will have a much richer experience. Numerous little things about Dylan are alluded to, which in this carnivalesque, hypnotic, trippy ride of a film, without prior knowledge it would not be apparent what was at stake. For example, in one scene it is suggested that the true identity of the young, black, Woody Guthrie pretender Dylan, might be a boy from Brookline called Edelstein – Dylan’s real last name was Zimmerman. Another example, an older Dylan (Richard Gere), hiding out in riddle town, has a dog named Henry that he loses and then finds. Although I am not exactly sure what Haynes was getting at with the dog, Henry certainly brought to mind some of Dylan’s more recent songs, “Love Henry” from World Gone Wrong, and the controversy over whether or not Dylan lifted lines from the poetry of Henry Timrod (2006 album, “Modern Times”). I definitely recommend this film!

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