Standard Operating Procedure

It's been a busy couple of weeks, quite apart from the hilarity of the comments posted all over this blog by the pseudonymous Winston and my e-mail correspondence with Korbett Matthews, producer-director-writer-cinematographer of The Man Who Crossed the Sahara, who desperately wanted to know my real name, so that he could look up my films and take his revenge. My advice to Korbett: stop obsessing about what other people think of you and make a better film next time. Success is the best revenge.

All this, especially the work I get paid to do, distracted me from posting about the film I'd been looking forward to most this year, Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure.

Morris's previous film, The Fog of War, is one of my favourite docs of all time - as close to a perfect documentary as I have seen. Gates of Heaven and The Thin Blue Line are also on my personal top-10 list. And the buzz around Standard Operating Procedure - reported $5-million budget, a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, a simultaneous book release - suggested this film was expected to make a big impact.

Instead, the film is already gone from theatres here in Toronto. When I saw it two weeks ago, in its second week of release, there were six people in the theatre on a Thursday evening, including my group of four. Across North America, SOP isn't even close to matching the box office success of this year's Canadian doc sleeper hit Up the Yangtze. What went wrong? As far as I can see, a lot more than just the fact that it's damn near impossible to get the public to watch yet another documentary about Iraq.

It's difficult not to judge Standard Operating Procedure against Morris's other work, and by the standards he himself has set. Compared to most films by mere mortals of the documentary world, it's an extremely impressive work: Morris throws his unparalleled interviewing skills and visual imagination at the story, and these things carry it a long way. But it's not his best film. Far from it.

The story is one of the biggest American scandals in modern times, about which everyone thinks they know something. If anyone can make us re-think our opinion, it's Morris, who once proved the innocence of a man convicted in Texas of killing a cop. And just as importantly, it's a story about photographs, which gives Morris a lot more to work with than Alex Gibney had in Taxi to the Dark Side, his Oscar-winning investigation of a killing at Baghram prison in Afghanistan.

Morris attacks the story with his usual mix of interviews, carefully staged re-enactments and metaphoric visuals. The interviews, conducted via his Interrotron device, are by far the best thing about the film. Morris may be the best interviewer working today. His subjects aren't just answering questions; they're invariably telling stories, reflecting, revealing. I have to admit that for a long time I thought the Interrotron was just a gimmick, but after watching a few of Morris's films more carefully recently, I can see its impact, and would love to try using it myself.

But the Interrotron, which really can enhance the connection between interview subject and viewer, is not a magic bullet: I've also seen films that have used a similar device with far less interesting results. The key to Morris's success is that his questions force the subjects to think on camera: you can see them considering a question or changing their mind – that's what makes the interviews dynamic and exciting. The achievement in Standard Operating Procedure is that he gets interesting, revealing answers from the soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib abuses. In Fog of War, his subject was a highly intelligent, charismatic man reflecting on a 60-year career; in SOP, Morris gets similar results from a half-dozen army grunts who've been reviled in the media and have little reason to trust anyone with their story. (I guess it doesn't hurt that Morris paid them for the interviews.) I'd love to watch his rushes and see how he does it.

But here's the problem: there are so damn many of these interviews - something like a dozen - that Morris loses control of the film. A few of the subjects - Sabrina Harman, the lesbian solder; Javal Davis, the African-American one; Tim Dugan, the contract interrogator - are so engaging, I thought each of them was worthy of a film of his or her own. But the result of this embarrassment of riches is an unfocused film: Standard Operating Procedure has too many strands, which Morris never quite brings together. Clocking in at almost two hours, the film has one false ending after another. At least half a dozen times, it feels like the film has reached a natural conclusion, only to lurch onto another point. If only Morris had struck to the central questions: how the events in the photographs came about, what really happened, and why. Instead, he dwells on too many related events, and too many stories from minor players. It's a heavy barrage of claims and ideas, difficult to keep track of, and 90 minutes into the film, rapidly becoming overwhelming. The Thin Blue Line methodically built a case for the innocence of Randall Dale Adams; SOP just doesn't have the same storytelling discipline.

And there's another element that took me out of the story. Morris is famous for his dramatic re-creations. In The Thin Blue Line, they were disciplined and sparse, and used for a specific reason: to examine the conflicting stories told by several eyewitnesses, and to expose the implausibility of some of these accounts. In Fog of War, Morris mostly used metaphoric imagery and archival footage. But now, working with a huge budget, it's as if he's lost all sense of restraint. The torture of Iraqi prisoners is meticulously re-created based on the infamous photos. Actors play soldiers and prisoners, and there is even a close-up of a vicious, snarling dog, complete with scary growl. It doesn't work. Most of these scenes are much too literal, serving only to break the connection between the storyteller (i.e. the interviewee) and the viewer.

I had a discussion this morning with a producer who's pitching a hybrid documentary-dramatization series, and so I had to think about what bothers me about the use of literal dramatization or re-enactment in documentaries. I think the problem is that such a hybrid serves neither documentary nor drama. A retrospective documentary such as this one (as opposed to what Allan King calls an actuality drama) relies on a connection between the storyteller and the viewer, and the engagement of the viewer's imagination. Cutting to an overly literal dramatization breaks that bond, and invariably interferes with the imagination. Full-out drama, with actors and a script, relies on a suspension of disbelief and an immersion in the world created by the filmmaker. Cutting to an interview in the midst of this breaks the suspension of disbelief, and makes the drama feel contrived. A successful blend of the two needs to show just enough to give viewers something to hang their imagination on. In Standard Operating Procedure, Morris shows too much.

Standard Operating Procedure is not a bad film. Morris is too skilled to mess things up completely. But it looks like, in trying to do too much, he lost control of the story. One clue to how things went on this production is in the credits: there are three editors listed, and three "co-editors." Two of the co-editors were the editors of record on five of Morris's best-known films. Reading between the lines, I would guess there was a lot of unhappiness in the Standard Operating Procedure cutting room.