There are few cinematic objects more frustrating than a work of documentary agitprop in which the packaging undermines an otherwise vital message. Such is the case with director Rick Rowley's eye-opening yet stylistically pedantic new feature, Dirty Wars, adapted from the non-fiction book of the same title by journalist Jeremy Scahill. A progressive muckraker for the digital age, Scahill is an unapologetic anti-Establishment monkeywrencher who has reported from war zones across the world for media outlets such as Democracy Now! and The Nation.
Rowley's film depicts Scahill's head-first plunge into the twilit realm of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which reportedly conducts shadowy missions wherever the United States wishes to exert its military might in the War on Terror. Rowley and Scahill—who also serves as a producer, co-writer, narrator, and de facto star—presents JSOC as a sinister force of crypto-imperialism, but Dirty Wars' criticisms go beyond generalized liberal disapproval of warmongering. Indeed, what animates Scahill's skulduggery is personal and specific: encounters with the families of civilians slain in nocturnal raids and missile strikes, allegedly carried out by JSOC.
As an exposé of the U.S.' reckless and counter-productive military policy over the past decade, Dirty Wars is a noble and reasonably effective work. However, Rowley's reliance on visual and aural cliches—Gritty, desaturated desert photography! Vaguely ethnic vocalization!—induces eye-rolling when the feature should be involving. Most vexingly, the film often feels like a vanity portrait of Scahill as the crusading, world-weary reporter, vainly struggling to uncover the Truth beneath the government's lies. This posture does not negate the facts presented in Dirty Wars, but it tends to distract from the film's otherwise compelling arguments.
