The Kingdom in an Era of Moral Obligations
By Josh Bolotsky, Living Liberally
Alert: Spoilers included.
In these days of widespread illiteracy, functional illiteracy... anything that keeps people stupid is a felony.
- Harlan Ellison
If nothing else, the basic function of most film critics is to let you know whether or not your precious time is worth giving to a motion picture. With this in mind, I've constructed the following litmus test for whether you might enjoy The Kingdom: if, upon learning of the decapitation of Nick Berg, your first reaction was not horror but instead "y'know, this would be perfect fodder for a cheap emotional thrill in a hyper-mediocre Hollywood potboiler," you will love this film.
One might feel that this reaction sounds less than human, and yet it remains accurate - The Kingdom is not by all appearances a film made for human beings, at least not any human beings I've ever met. Granted, the world is large enough, and the number of films released to any fanfare small enough, that it is virtually a mathematical certainty that every single feature film you will ever see is or will be someone's all-time favorite. Even so, it is difficult to imagine for whom The Kingdom might claim that honored spot, or, for that matter, whom the creators of The Kingdom thought might enjoy it.
But to confirm what the above suggests, yes, it is true - in one of the most openly exploitative sequences I've ever had the misfortune of viewing in a mainstream Hollywood film, we see Jason Bateman's character, a member of an elite FBI unit sent to investigate a recent terror attack upon American families in Saudi Arabia, being held in a shaded, unidentifable room, a machete to his throat, in a virtual note-for-note re-enactment of the Nick Berg beheading. To what end does the film induce this emotional trauma on its audience? To make a no-holds-barred argument about the type of enemy we face in the form of fundamentalist terrorists? To fulfill a necessary plot point? To drive home the type of environment our protagonists have found themselves in? None of the above are discernible, unless the filmmakers are so clumsy they can't even communicate the most rudimentary information. (Not entirely impossible, given the film's dramatic tone-deafness.)
No, the purpose of the sequence is to make us wince. Not because it's so masterfully executed, but for a simpler reason - we remember the Berg beheading, the film knows that we remember the Berg beheading, and it knows we will cringe if it brings it up explicitly enough. For a filmmaker hoping for an easy reaction, this is shooting fish in a barrel, damn the moral consequences of treating the lives and death of real people as window-dressing in a hack thriller.
To be clear, we don't wince because we worry about Jason Bateman as a character - but then, that's partially because he doesn't have a character, but only a function within the team of good guys, the elite FBI unit. While the film provides the service of giving us names for these characters, I'd like to humbly suggest the following names as more to-the-point appellations:
Jamie Foxx plays "The Hero." How do we know he's a hero? Most obviously, because we're subjected to not one, not two, not three but four (!) scenes of him winning children over with his easygoing manner. These provide no plot development and are in no way dramatically compelling - they simply let us know he is a Great Guy. Aww. (Some films have moments where you begin to wonder if the filmmaker actually despises you. By the third time Foxx kneels down to comfort a lachrymose child, we begin to wonder what we did to deserve this.)
Jennifer Garner plays "The Woman." That is all the film thinks we need to know about her character. It gives her three basic functions:
A. Be a reliable choice when we need a member of the team to express emotion - in a film where every protagonist faces considerable agony, she's the only one that I can remember being, y'know, affected by it. Boys don't cry.
B. Be the subject of jokes about how downright zany it is to be a woman in the middle east, how she better start wearing a blanket instead of a t-shirt, ho ho ho.
C. Provide blatant ass-covering to charges of anti-feminism when she's able to physically attack the Bad Muslims at the end - just like the boys, see. (Including, in a moment designed to elicit cheers but only garnered groans in my screening, by stabbing the Head Bad Muslim in the groin. Not putting too fine a point on things there, nosiree.)
Chris Cooper plays "The Grizzled Veteran." How do we know he's the grizzled veteran? Well, he spits in the ground and talks about the good ol' days and says things like, "Man, this is gnarlier than a Dead concert!" (Note: this is not an actual piece of dialogue, but I promise it is a marked improvement over the actual dialogue.) His job is to smile and chuckle to himself a lot, even when it is totally incongruous with what we might consider standard human behavior. Example: realizing that a group of terrorists had planned to attach an explosive device to an ambulance, he says along the lines of, "Those bastards - they were trying to incinerate an ambulance, women and children. Sick bastards." Imagine, if you will, the way that any healthy, moral human being might respond to this horrific piece of information. Create an image in your mind of how your face might look at that moment. Hold it. Now, consider the fact that Cooper's character is all smiles and chuckles when he delivers it, looking at his fellow team members as if he's just recited a funny joke, a real knee-slapper.
Jason Bateman plays "The Smart-Ass." Besides being, as mentioned above, a hostage at the end, this is pretty straightforward - he wisecracks in entirely inappropriate situations, and we as an audience are expected to dutifully reply, "Oh, that Jason Bateman!", perhaps with a playfully wagging finger for good measure. (Maybe not an entirely bad idea - this film would be much more entertaining if presented as an episode of Arrested Development gone terribly, terribly awry.)
However, for all the calculated inconsequence of the Bateman character, it is something he does roughly halfway in that indicates just what is so rotten at this film's core. They're back at camp, resting up from a long day of looking really good in the desert, and Bateman's character is reading from - no joke - The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Koran. "How many virgins do these guys' version of Islam say you get when you die?" "60," guesses Garner's character. A comic pause. Then, from Bateman, a simple "Nope." An easily earned laugh from the audience ensues.
However, let's examine this scene for more than the 0.25 seconds the film gives us to mull it afterwards. These are, we're told again and again, the top of the top, the cream of the cream, four of the best Middle Eastern terror analysts the FBI has to offer - and they're not only catching up on The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Koran as bedtime reading, but finding it is better-informed than they are? (Granted, this would explain some of our Iraq policy - zing!)
Lest one think this is some sly comment by the film on the arrogance of US foreign policy - not that such a display of cowardice in expression and willful disregard for continuity would be much better - we are shown time and time again how they are The Best At What They Do. The incompetent Saudi morticians miss crucial details in their autopsy - Garner finds incredibly important revelations casually. The incompetent Saudi inspectors can't preserve evidence in even the most basic way - Cooper and Grossman put them to shame. The Good Muslims don't know how to deal with the intransigence of the Saudi royal family in supporting the investigation - Foxx has such a instinctive feel for Saudi politics that he's able to have one conversation with the prince and get all problems out of their way. These, we're told over and over again, are experts.
In other words, the filmmakers either a. didn't consider anything odd about the notion that American Middle East experts would know next to nothing about Islam, period, much less about schisms between moderate and fundamentalist Muslims, or b. had a cynicism regarding their audience's intelligence that borders on hatred.
No matter what delusions, real or affected, the filmmakers claim to have about its social relevance, The Kingdom is a piece of popular entertainment. Granted, watching it is such a dreary, unpleasant experience that it is hard to imagine anyone being entertained by it, but the fact it fails at its intended purpose does not change what that intended purpose is.
If you're like most readers of this site, I don't need to tell you that we live in an age where a sleeping media and a perpetually on-guard right wing have fostered a tragic level of ignorance, an ignorance which constantly misinforms our national debates. I also don't need to tell you the percentages of Americans that even now believe that Saddam Hussein played some role in the 9-11 attacks, the nearly monolithic ignorance of Islam, etc. You know all this. But the filmmakers of The Kingdom don't - they really seem to have been living in a different planet for much of the past few years. (Key example: Foxx needs to convince the Saudi prince that his team can be trusted to find the terrorists behind it all, and he says "You have to trust me on this - America is not perfect, but we're good at finding people." Make your own smart-aleck Bin Laden joke.)
We don't need to hold the makers of popular entertainment to the same standard suggested by the Ellison quote above - it's not necessary that every film actively improve the situation, and there's nothing wrong with an intellectually neutral film. However, is it really so spoilsport-like, so onerous a requirement to believe that we live in an era where there is a minimal moral obligation not to make the bad situation worse? Not to condone ignorance? Not to treat the Middle East like it's a giant set for us to strut around?
The most painful thing about watching The Kingdom is it believes itself to be a moral film. In the same spirit of the aforementioned ass-covering when it comes to a decidedly, um, non-egalitarian view of gender roles, this is a film that considers morality to be a process whereby you find the areas where you might offend people and making sure you cover yourself. Faced with choices that'd be difficult for any storyteller, moral or otherwise, it consistently takes the most garish, uninteresting way out, as if it were trying to become a textbook in how not to resolve dramatic issues. For instances, the film is afraid it might start to become a little Islamophobic - does it resolve the issue by fleshing out one of the Muslim characters, or even the more blunt but effective answer of expository dialogue indicating that they are dealing with extremists within the Muslim world? Nope - instead, the film decides to indulge in a syruppy five-minute montage of how Muslims are Just Like Us!, with clips of smiling Muslim children, and Muslims praying for peace, and so on - the only thing the scene is missing is Cyndi Lauper's True Colors on the soundtrack as a smiling child flies a kite.
In the same spirit is virtually every scene with Ashraf Barhom's character, a Saudi Colonel on the side of our guys. In the world of the film, there are Good Muslims, like Ashraf Barhom's character, who instead of comforting sad children, like Foxx, takes care of his ill father, and Bad Muslims, who grunt and do awful things. Letting us know that Barhom is a Good Muslim, and thereby clearing Muslims generally, requires the worst fish-out-of-water comedy I've seen since Police Academy: Mission to Moscow. Foxx makes some reference to the shit hitting the fan, Barhom asks "you need to go toilet?" Is this Perfect Strangers?
However, the worst offender is the ending. We close on the team back home, their mission complete, all right in the world...or is it? Bateman's character refers to an earlier scene where Garner realizes that a loved one of hers was killed in the terror attack, and Foxx comes over to her and whispers some comforting words in her ears. (Women, children...the only ones who don't need Foxx to comfort them in this film are grown men.) What, Batemen asks, did Foxx whisper in her ear? "That we'd kill them all," he offers. We cut to the son of the Head Bad Muslim in Saudi Arabia, looking over the destruction of his family, as a woman whispers in his ear, "don't worry - we'll kill them all." The end.
Leave aside that this is the facile analysis of a grade-school student, palming off the mess of the Middle East to a hastily-constructed cycle of violence without considering beyond the most superficial level the actual grievances of those in the region. More crucially, this is notable because, in a film that has given no consideration whatsoever to the actual moral issues entangled in the US-Saudi relationship, it has decided, as a sort of flimsy band-aid, that if it includes literally 15 seconds of thrown-together morality play, it gets off the hook. Au contraire. I'd rather watch a film that has the nihilistic courage of its convictions to end just as thoughtlessly as it began. In some ways, it is much, much worse to end on this note.
After all, 15 seconds of apology do not excuse dumbing us down for 119 minutes.
