Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Restrepo is a slice of gritty pie — an experiential, you-are-there travelogue of war reportage from veteran conflict photographer Tim Hetherington and author-journalist Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm) that chronicles a year-plus of fighting in Afghanistan’s deadly Korengal Valley. While not without some undeniable anecdotal punching power, the film nonetheless seems like a bit of a relic since it unfolds in a relative vacuum, willfully ignorant or silent on any of the factors influencing some of the events we see on the ground.
Unfolding from June 2007 through July 2008, in a remote valley in the eastern part of Afghanistan, where at one point 70 percent of all the ordinance being used in the war in was being dropped, Restrepo (pronounced ress-TREP-o) offers up a look at the soldiers of Second Platoon, Battle Company, as they engage in wrestling matches, weekly “shuras,” or meetings with locals, and, most notably, the building and stubborn maintenance of a same-named, remote forward operating post, tabbed for a fallen medic comrade. This footage — presented somewhat chronologically, but not exactingly so, and never with date stamps — is intercut with separate, closely shot, individual interview reminiscences.
On both a technical level — the captured footage of the nearly daily firefights pops with a jumbled, chaotic authenticity that would make even Paul Greengrass jealous — and a base emotional level, the movie connects. Owing to both its terrain and conditions on the ground, the Korengal Valley seems a pretty hellish place, fairly immune to even the most meager material comforts (hot meals, iPods, slightly comfortable beds) that are part of modern-day warfare, and Restrepo communicates this.
Embedded with the soldiers for the whole year, Hetherington and Junger, operating their own cameras but staying out of the frames, do a good job in capturing the pervasive sense of low-lying dread and anxiety that swirls around the regular grunts on the ground in war. But they seem allergic to any broader contextual framing or analysis. As such, it’s almost as if Restrepo dates from the days of the Korean War or the early Vietnam era, before the idea of any sort of messiness seeped into the manner in which war was packaged and sold to the American public back at home.
The most heartrending stuff — one soldier talking about avoiding mentioning any of the specifics of his deployment in conversations home, and having to swallow hard and put on a shine when wishing his mother a happy birthday just days after losing a buddy; another smiling in clinched psychological disengagement while talking about taking sleeping pills to combat post-traumatic stress reactions and nightmares — comes from the first-person testimonials that are intertwined with all the captured day-to-day footage. The sad and bitter truth, though, is that those passages would retain their impact even without anything else being used to frame them. Restrepo represents, in its hands-on construction, an extraordinary feat. The actual finished product, however, doesn’t attempt to give any value to the actions of the men on screen, and as such it robs them of their courage, in a way. (National Geographic Entertainment/Outpost Films, unrated, 93 minutes)
