A Pieced-Together Picture Of the Scandal at Abu Ghraib

Is Errol Morris's "Standard Operating Procedure" meant to be taken as art or as journalism?

What fascinates Morris isn't really the answers to who did what to whom when, as a journalist would demand, but something far subtler: What is, really, the "record," the "narrative"? He takes the scandal at the military prison of Abu Ghraib as his laboratory, and sets out to contextualize the famous pictures of the harsh treatment -- some would call it torture, but whatever, it wasn't pleasant -- of Iraqi prisoners by American service personnel.

His particular starting point is the photo that essentially gave the issue its public face: that horrifying and dispiriting image of the young soldier Lynndie England, a cigarette dangling from her lips, her boyish face and T-shirt a kind of personification of American puckishness, as she stands next to an Iraqi tethered to her by leash, on his hands and knees, in a kind of funny, degrading mask, the whole thing a dissonant juxtaposition of "Peck's Bad Boy"-ishness with S&M sexual ritual.

The best sequence of the documentary follows as Army investigator Brent Pack takes Morris, and by extension us, on an odyssey through hell, via photographs, as he reconstructs a timeline not only from that photo but from others (the Army must rue the day the digital camera was invented), as England and her pals did their version of "duty" that day.

We make amazing discoveries: England was not alone as that disturbing photo suggests, and the atmosphere of the corridor was more party-like than solitary. Indeed, another young woman soldier was cropped from the picture for aesthetic reasons, but that decision also changed the mood of the shot, making it more like a shocking, solitary moment of squalid demoralization than a kind of general flow of perhaps regrettable but less sexualized behavior.

It is truly fascinating to watch as Pack, abetted by Morris's longtime documentary techniques, is able to arrange pictures on the timeline, by angle, by proximity to the central events. The film re-creates that day, leaving one with a far more aesthetic than journalistic question: Does the camera show "reality," or is it, by its very nature, so subjective that no true "reality" can be demonstrated to exist?

Of all Morris's films (among them "The Fog of War," "A Brief History of Time" and "Mr. Death"), this one is most reminiscent of "The Thin Blue Line," another movie built around the idea that the official "record" is fragile and comes apart if closely examined. The movie is primarily a tapestry of talking heads, and one can say that at last these young people, who've been merely symbols up to now, have a chance to talk.

England herself is certainly the "star" of the picture, as she was of the scandal, and proves herself to be far from the Queen Sadisto quality the photos imply, instead emerging as a somewhat plucky, if dull and not terribly articulate, victim herself.

As he did in "The Fog of War" with Robert McNamara, Morris films the interviewees in a particularly harsh light, so that all the imperfections of England's skin stand out almost in bas-relief. This seems to be a metaphorical decision, his way of informing us that this is the "reality." But isn't it in itself subjective? What if he lets the kid put on some lipstick and a little blush, and goes to a golden-toned light, and even moves it back a bit? Aren't we being controlled by the technique, and isn't it tilting our reactions?

Morris's stylizations are well known by this time, and perhaps, given the seriousness of the subject matter, this might have been an ideal time to abandon them. But we get the big, rushing musical score (by Danny Elfman, one of Hollywood's most expensive film composers) that provides momentum; we get highly stylized evocations of certain events, such as the death by shotgun fire of a prisoner who was admittedly armed and had opened fire and wounded a guard, but no bogus "re-creations" familiar from the History Channel; we get frequent blackouts to bridge the disjointedness of some of the interviews; we get super-sophisticated graphics, as in the timeline mock-up.

But if the movie meant to uncover any "big scandals," it's a disappointment. It's full of inferences that higher-ups tacitly approved of the near-torture and extremely intensive ill-treatment meant to intimidate the prisoners into cooperation, but it never proves "torture" in what might be called a classical sense: systematic beatings, near drownings, electrification of vulnerable body parts, fingernail removal and so forth.

In fact, the investigator, in one surprising sequence, goes through a number of alleged "torture" photos and acknowledges that the vast majority of them represent "standard operating procedure." That is supposed to be the film's kicker: not what was illegal but how much was legal.

Its findings are thin, primarily detailing only four episodes: the mistreatment in that infamous corridor by five members of the 372nd Military Police Company, the shotgunning of the admittedly armed prisoner, the mysterious death of a high-ranking Iraqi officer and the further mistreatment of several prisoners who were suspected of raping a child.

It's difficult to see a national scandal in all this. I see only a squad scandal, a small group of soldiers under the command of a corporal named Charles Graner. Graner is the missing voice in this film, denied the latitude to contribute by the military that is holding him in prison for 10 years.

But he's the bete noire. Clearly, the film makes a strong case that it was his strong if maladjusted personality that was setting the tone on that particular watch on that particular corridor in that particular prison. He was also married to one of his soldiers and sleeping with another one! Surely there's something in the Uniform Code of Military Justice about that one.

The issue then is: Was Graner a classic bad apple, a wrong guy at a wrong time who abused his powers grotesquely (and one has to ask: Where the hell was the platoon sergeant in all this?) or was he an instrument of policy, either tacitly or implicitly attempting to follow what he believed were orders? The disappointment in "Standard Operating Procedure" is that it never quite answers this question.

Standard Operating Procedure (116 minutes, at Landmark's E Street, Landmark's Bethesda Row and AMC Loews Shirlington) is rated R for disturbing images and content involving torture and graphic nudity, and for language.