Errol Morris Saves Lives

In 1988, Errol Morris released his third documentary,The Thin Blue Line, in which he exposed the willingness of government officials to frame an innocent man for the murder of a police officer. Morris' investigation via the film led to the release of Randall Dale Adams, and The Thin Blue Line was viewed as groundbreaking by the public and critics, even while it was scorned by some within documentary-filmmaking circles due to Morris' willingness to recreate sequences that were verbally recounted by witnesses and the officers' reports. To recreate sequences for a documentary is as un-kosher as serving pastrami on rye with a side of cottage cheese. But Morris did it and made it work and a man went free.

Today Morris seems to define his films as "nonfiction" rather than documentary, but to me that rings of semantics and veers from the most obvious point -- Errol Morris continues to be the director behind some of the most riveting films in any theater-going experience.

Morris' history is well known, from his stint as a P.I. to his infamous bet that resulted in Werner Herzog cooking and eating of one of his own shoes. Morris has a personal history that can only be equaled by his bold historical films, which include The Fog of War. While that film didn't exactly change my opinion of Robert S. McNamara -- this is a guy who's doomed to his own personal hell -- it certainly showed a shift in attitudes toward Vietnam from Kennedy to LBJ that I was unaware of. That McNamara never spoke out, that he stayed the course as it were, is reprehensible. The film is brutally honest and takes you deep into McNamara's thought process and rationale for follies that the world is still paying for.

From what I have read, in his latest film, SOP: Standard Operating Procedure, Morris tackles the Abu Ghraib torture scandal (Warning -- these are disturbing images) head on and asks the very pointed question: if torture was the standard operating procedure, why were no officials held responsible? Morris uses his known style of recreation to tell the story and put the viewers face to face with the documented acts of torture. In an interview in Bust Magazine (it was my girlfriend's copy, honest), Emily Rems recounts the story of an audience member "shouting that the film's reenactments were unnecessary and disturbing." I will have to see the film to have an opinion, but I believe the sequences should be disturbing, otherwise, what's the point?

The Thin Blue Line freed an innocent man from prison by documenting the absurd, twisted logic that put him there. With SOP, maybe Morris can do the reverse by documenting the absurd, twisted logic that kept the sanctioning officials who signed off on a murderous American torture farm out of prison.

SOP: Standard Operating Procedure opens on April 25th.

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