In The Loop (Armando Iannucci, 2009)

After suffering through years of documentaries and fiction films that aimed to reveal the "truth" about the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its fallout, Iannucci finally made the one that dared to be the one with the facts "in a world of truth." Facts, of course, not as "smoking guns" (something, and the media obsession to which, that the film made a point of satirizing) to the "truth" behind the invasion, but rather the world that crafted the facts and thus the truths: the bureaucrats and political careerists who, mired in their own self delusion and and narcissism, lead the world to war. Unlike the political documentaries of 2004, or the series of dramas produced in 2005 and 2006, Iannucci doesn't pit pacifists against war-mongers, left versus right, Bush against everyone else. Instead, he portrays the political creatures that crafted and adopted the war as people who, although having moral ideas of their own, must balance everything else to their prospects as insiders in Washington. There is a sense of people who want to do what is right, but also people who feel the need to be in the thick of Washington games not only to do what is right, but out of their sheer need to believe that they are instrumental in bringing rectitude about. Unlike previous efforts that also focused on the politics of war, Iannucci gives us characters who have moral and emotional investment to doing what is right, no matter how venal their actions become, or how misguided and dogmatic their beliefs have become. Although Iannucci uses cinema verite style filtered through exploitative TV tactics, his story ultimately points out the contradiction of reality via television broadcasts, and reveals that his spastic characters, through severe overacting and over the top cursing, are ultimately just banal characters existing in a world where war is just business as usual. Beyond portrayals of torture, revelations of lies and deceptions, and seedy stories of who is responsible for what, the truth of war's everydayness and bureaucratic casualness is the most horrifying.