Mark Steyn reviews "13 Hours"
* * *
Michael (Transformers) Bay has now made two feature films
about real-life military attacks on U.S. sovereign territory - in 2001 Pearl
Harbor, which was enough to have you rooting for the Japs, and now "13
Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi."
Happily, the latter does not have much in common with the
former, save for a reprise of what evidently Mr. Bay regards as his signature -
a rocket falling from the skies to its target, but shot from the rocket's point
of view.
(If you object that a rocket is an inanimate object and
can't have a point of view, well, it's all comparative: in Pearl Harbor, the
rocket was a lot less inanimate than Ben Affleck.)
(*AMUSED SMIRK*)
In "13 Hours" the director has a grittier and
hairier cast, and makes a good-faith if not wholly successful effort to dial
back the prettifying devices of blockbuster film-making.
As for the point of view, the rocket has one. But Bay
doesn't. This is a visceral, sensory, pulverizing, you-are-there slab of action
- all twitchy cameras, sudden edits, jerky cross-cuts - in which the context of
the fireballs all around is left for another day.
The director describes "13 Hours" as "my
most real movie", but it doesn't have to be that real to be more real than
the official version.
Film-making and storytelling have been part of the
Benghazi fiasco since the evening of September 11, 2012, when the [Obama
Administration] decided to tell its own story about a film-maker whose all but
unseen video had, they insisted, led to the death of a U.S. ambassador.
In the Hillary Clinton version, four Americans died at
the hands of (as I put it at the time) "a spontaneous class-action movie
review."
Three days later, when the President, the Secretary of
State and the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations were all still lying to the
American People about what happened and why, my characterization of that night
holds up better than the Government's:
"As Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher's teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: That's not a spontaneous movie protest; that's an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower's response to it. Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise."
"One can understand why they might do this, given the fiasco in Libya. The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the embassy in Tripoli. How did that happen? They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a "safe house," and switched their attentions accordingly. How did that happen? The United States government lost track of its ambassador for ten hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they've investigated Mitt Romney's press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press."
In the end, the court eunuchs chose to continue fanning
Sultan Barack.
Three years later, based on a book by five of the
survivors, Bay's film belatedly provides answers to some of the basic questions
the media never asked.
It's not a political film at all: Hillary is never
mentioned by name, and for the whole of the film the Government of the United
States - indeed, in a more basic sense, the entire global hyperpower - is an
unseen character confined to the end of a telephone that no one ever picks up.
There are occasional glimpses of nearby assets - a U.S.
air base across the Med in Italy - but in this [modern] "Western"... the
cavalry never come.
(*PURSED LIPS*)
Three years ago we were told that they couldn't have got
there "in time" - so, in Hillary's [screeched] words, "What
difference would it have made!?"
But as I wrote at the time:
"It's easy, afterwards, to say that nothing would have made any difference. But, at the time Deputy Chief Hicks was calling 9-1-1 and getting executive-branch voicemail, nobody in Washington knew how long it would last. A terrorist attack isn't like a soccer game, over in 90 minutes. If it is a sport, it's more like a tennis match: whether it's all over in three sets or goes to five depends on how hard the other guy pushes back.""The government of the United States took the extremely strange decision to lose in straight sets.""Not only did they not deploy out-of-area assets, they ordered even those in Libya to stand down."
* YEP. AND OTHER THAN THE FILM DIRECTLY IDENTIFYING THE
CIA STATION CHIEF AS THE "VILLAIN" (WHILE NOT EVEN ACKNOWLEDGING THE
EXISTENCE OF A CIA CHAIN OF COMMAND - LET ALONE POINTING OUT THAT FORMER
GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS WAS DCIA) NO OTHER FINGERS WERE DIRECTLY POINTED AT REAL
LIFE DECISION-MAKERS... SUCH AS LEON PANETTA... HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON... AND
BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA HIMSELF.
(*PURSED LIPS*)
That's the story as Bay tells it. For two-plus hours, you
feel only the absence of the global superpower... as indeed many beleaguered
Americans and American allies around the planet have felt these last years.
The background is sketched efficiently enough. John
Krasinski, the nice bloke from the U.S. version of "The Office" lands
in Libya hirsute and bulked up. He's playing Jack Silva, a private security
contractor for whom this is just another gig in just another Krappistan.
He's met at the terminal by his old Navy Seal buddy
Tyrone Woods (James Badge Dale) and even on the drive back from the airport it's
clear that Benghazi is a town where the Libyan government's writ doesn't run
and turning left instead of right can have serious consequences for your life
expectancy. When they run into trouble at an ad-hoc militia checkpoint, Woods
has a well-rehearsed line to hand, pointing to the sky and telling the dime store
jihadist that every aspect of the encounter is currently being watched by the
all-seeing drone. (As we'll discover, the world's first drone superpower sees
everything ...but doesn't do anything.)
Woods and Silva work for GRS - the Global Response Staff
- whose job is to provide security for the CIA operatives in the city.
* WHY DOES NOT THE U.S. MILITARY PROVIDE SECURITY FOR THE
CIA? THIS ISSUE IS NEVER ADDRESSED.
There are six of them, with monosyllabic nicknames -
Rone, Tig, Oz, Boon - and a trait apiece: One of them is a bookish type partial
to Joseph Campbell, which provides Bay with some voice-overed philosophical
musings in the final moments. Otherwise, this is where the director descends to
his traditional caricatures. In contrast to the hairy muscular tattooed GRS
guys, the CIA types are clean-cut pocket-pen pansy-assed snooty desk-jockeys
with Ivy League Master's in Nation-building Studies, all under the command of a
CIA Head of Station called "Bob" (David Costabile) on his last
posting before retirement. (Because there are no girls in this story, one of
the CIA agents is female, a thankless role well-played by Alexia Barlier.)
The pointy-heads don't want these dumb lummoxes causing
any trouble.
When the CIA occasionally ventures out from its crusader
fort to meet with local bigwigs, Jack goes along as protection, posing as Mlle
Barlier's hubby, but sneeringly instructed not to say a word.
(In the course of the film, Mlle Barlier's character
comes to see that, when the chips are down, you need these hard men. Whereas
the dweebiest of the desk-jockeys, on being instructed to grab a gun and head
to the roof, responds, "He's joking, right?")
This is the CIA we're talking about, remember. They can't
really be that effete and disconnected, can they?
* Umm...
(*SHRUGGING*)
They surely can't have that little sense of their
vulnerability - of their precarious toehold on a disintegrating landscape.
(*STILL SHRUGGING*)
Next door to their compound itinerant herders graze sheep
and doe-eyed boys skim stones, but there seems to be a method in their
comings-and-goings, as if it's the intelligence agency that's under
surveillance.
A mile away, inside the diplomatic compound, things are
even more surreal. There's a pool, and the lobby looks like the Benghazi Hyatt,
but the State Department security are rank amateurs and their local guards are
unarmed and the foreigners lack the language skills ever to be entirely sure
about the natives they've hired.
(As one American marvels, after watching his militia
comrade on his cellphone, the so-called good guys mysteriously have the bad
guys on speed-dial.)
* AND NO, FOLKS, JUST IN CASE ANYONE IS WONDERING, THE
FACT THAT A U.S. CONSULATE ISN'T GUARDED BY U.S. MARINES ISN'T ADDRESSED VIA
THE FILM. (NOR... SINCE I'M BRINGING THE MATTER UP... DID REPUBLICANS SEEM TOO
INTERESTED IN HIGHLIGHTING THIS DURING THEIR CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS.)
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
The "friendlies" fade into the shadows, the
"hostiles" metastasize; as the night unfolds, you get the sense that
everyone - the goatherds, the grease-monkeys watching TV soccer, their shrouded
womenfolk - knows what's going on.
[Everyone]... except the Americans.
The CIA are tourists in the heart of darkness.
The world over the wall has a lazy sensuality, confident
that, when the infidels with the guns and the money depart, it will be as if
they were never there.
And so on September 11th the U.S. Ambassador, Chris Stevens (Matt
Letscher), described as a "true believer" in the new Libya, arrives
for a private meeting with the mayor - at which half the town shows up. (Instead
of being upset by the security breach, "Bob" is more irked at a GRS
guy dozing off during Stevens' happy-sappy remarks.)
When it all goes pear-shaped back at the compound, Bay is
unsparing in showing Stevens' panic and fear at the disintegration of his
illusions - he and Sean Smith are hastily shuffled into a "safe room,"
which, of course, thanks to the attention to detail of the money-no-object
State Department, is entirely unsafe.
* YEP...
(*SIGH*)
Unable to force their way in, the invading army simply
lights up the adjoining room, and the smoke under the door does the rest.
(*SILENCE*)
The decision to let their ambassador die appears to have
been taken early on. Was it just "Bob" back at the CIA annex rushing
into the yard and ordering GRS to stand down? Or did it come from higher up?
* WE DON'T KNOW! (BUT WE CAN SURE AS HELL GUESS!)
Half-a-dozen brave men plus a goofy Libyan interpreter
decide that, unlike the CIA, they're going to do what's right, and off they
set.
The GRS guys are well-cast by Bay. The one misstep is
Toby Stephens, playing Glen Doherty. The son of Maggie Smith and Robert
Stephens, Toby is best known as the baddie in Die Another Day, a very over-ripe
performance even by Bond-villain standards. He enters the picture back at the
embassy in Tripoli, when the diplomats are fretting that they have no assets in
country. Oh yes you do, says Stephens, stepping forward and fixing his gimlet
eye on the camera: "I need a bagful of money and a flight to
Benghazi." His face is too strong and his presence too actorly and the
line too portentous, and just for a moment the entire enterprise trembles on
the brink of Robert Stack in Airplane!
[In real life] Glen Doherty was a singularly brave man.
He was the guy who didn't shrug "What difference does it make?" And
so he made a difference; he got his flight, and he landed in Benghazi in the
early hours and made it to the roof of the compound to save American lives and
sacrifice his own.
(*BOWING MY HEAD*)
While the commander-in-chief went off to party in Vegas,
and the Secretary of State put her phone on voicemail, and the UN Ambassador
hit the TV circuit to peddle the official lie, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods
chose to act in defiance of the government that abandoned them. Bay does not
eschew the conventions of the genre, but Lorne Balfe's hitherto percussive
score finds an appropriate dignity for these final scenes.
We all know how the story ends, as perhaps they did, too,
in the last of those 13 hours.
It was a thankless task, a charge of the Light Brigade
necessitated by the absence of all the heavy power. But they did it... and
their sacrifice deserves to be honored.
There are other stories to tell about Benghazi - of
self-serving duplicity by shameless hollow nothings unfit for public office -
but Michael Bay has chosen to focus on heroism and sacrifice by men whom too
many Americans have forgotten.
I hope his film makes a difference.
* I DO TOO... BUT KNOWING WHAT SORT OF PEOPLE MOST
AMERICANS ARE NOWADAYS... I DOUBT IT WILL. HELL... I DOUBT MOST OF YOU READING
THIS WILL BOTHER TO SEE THE MOVIE IN THE THEATRE BUT WILL INSTEAD - PERHAPS -
WAIT TILL IT'S RELEASED ON DVD.
* YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE...
No comments:
Post a Comment