The Trinity, Redemption, and John Cusack's War, Inc.

WARNING! Contains spoilers! The following is an in-depth examination of some specific scenes in the movie War, Inc. If you have not seen the movie, read no further.

I previously wrote a review of War, Inc., which was a general first impression that spilled out of me immediately after seeing the movie for the first time. That first review really focused on the political issues of war profiteering and privatization of government functions, which Cusack raises in this film. Upon a second viewing, I realized there is a lot more going on in this movie. The layers of meaning I find in it are exquisite.

This movie is John Cusack's baby. It's never completely fair to say one contributor is responsible for a film. Films are always collective efforts. But Cusack produced, starred in, and contributed as a writer for this one. In an interview with costar Marisa Tomei, she emphasized that he had a hand in just about everything, and credited him with writing the film, although there are two other writer’s names on it along with his. He has created something very special.

A blog post by someone on MySpace named The REAL Bill got me thinking about what I might have missed on my first viewing of this film. I didn’t agree with much of Bill’s post, because the political content of War, Inc. is important, and Cusack has given many interviews on his political views. It really IS a political movie, and I don’t think it makes any sense to deny that.

But Bill proposed the idea that at a deeper level, the film was really about what we do to fill up our emptiness. Certainly these characters struggle with the feeling of emptiness.

I will hazard a guess that it's really about love and redemption, with that deeper message a brilliant counterpoint to the political message about crass commercialism, greed, and a callous disregard for life. In fact, in an early meeting over drinks with Natalie, Hauser says he is “looking for redemption in all the wrong places.”

There are three characters and three moments in the film that create a triangle relationship that I think is really interesting.

I hinted in my earlier review that the improbable relationships between Brand Hauser (John Cusack), Natalie Hagelhuzen (Marisa Tomei), and Yonica Babyyeah (Hilary Duff) turned into the most human and tender moments of the film. There are three moments of connection between these characters that I think are really key to understanding what is going on in this film.

The first one of them is when Hauser and Natalie come together in a sudden, unexpected, but irresistible kiss. This is the sexiest moment in the film for me.

Other sexual references throughout the film are deliberately crude, predatory, and depraved, to illustrate how sick it really is when sex becomes a commodity and is sold as a product.

The kiss in the Humvee between these two characters is different. This is the blossoming of real love between two people who've been able to "peel away the masks" and see each other. Earlier in the film, Hauser makes a remark about the word person:

“Did you know that the word person comes from the Latin word persona, which means mask? So maybe being human means we invite spectators to ponder what lies behind. Each of us would be composed of a variety of different masks, and if we can see behind the mask, we would get a burst of clarity, and if that flame was bright enough, that’s when we fall in love.”

Natalie takes this as a pretentious pickup line, and maybe that is how Hauser intends it, or maybe not.

In fact, this line may be one of the deepest insights at the heart of War, Inc. By the time Natalie and Hauser kiss, she has been able to glimpse the haunted soul of this very troubled man, seeing him for so much more than the dumb corporate drone she thought he was. He has likewise been able to see past her political preaching to the compassion from which it springs.

The second amazing moment in the film comes when Hauser has been sent to Yonica's hotel room to convince her that he doesn't hate her, when she has become convinced that he does.

He finds her sitting on her bed, strumming an acoustic guitar, and softly singing a beautiful song, and he says he feels like he's seeing her for the first time. She immediately resumes her trash-talking bitch persona, and when he asks why she does that, she says "Nobody cares for my beautiful soul. They care for my ass."

She later breaks down and, in a devastating moment, she tells him through her tears that she thinks she is from another world and says "I can not be from this place. I do not belong here." With this, she roundly rejects the world's suffering she cannot bear to feel a part of. On my second viewing, I cried too, recognizing that in my own darkest moments of despair, I have also uttered these very words. (Hilary Duff's performance here is quite wonderful.)

Then, in a sweet fatherly moment, Hauser feeds her to comfort her. Again, two people who initially made each other very uncomfortable finally connect and create a bond.

Lastly, there is the moment where Natalie and Yonica connect after having disliked and judged each other at first. This takes a while to build over several scenes.

They begin the connection over a makeshift meal in an abandoned estate, when Hauser tells them that his wife was murdered and his daughter kidnapped. We can see their shared sympathy for him (as they contemplate his loss of the feminine principle in his life).

Later, in the face of her impending dreaded marriage, Yonica is in despair because she believes she is a whore, but, she says, at least I can be a rich whore. Natalie tells her she doesn’t have to marry some asshole to get what she wants in life. Here, Natalie is offering her liberation, a powerful gift from one woman to another.

Yonica continues with her marriage plans, but eventually tells Natalie she will escape her husband by telling him she is going shopping in America and she will never return. She asks if she can live with Natalie, who cries out "oh, yes!"

I see in these three characters a trinity who unite to redeem each other with their love in what becomes a family by the end of the movie. This is not a trinity coming out of some paternalistic version of religion, however, because the strength of the two female characters ensures that the feminine principle is here restored to the sacred symbol. This is a spiritual union of equals.

Hauser has another interesting line, which seems a cynical joke when he tosses it off to Natalie at their first meeting. When questioned about the suffering that the war is causing, he says:

"But the way I look at it is this: the day we can actually feel and hear all the suffering of mankind, that’s the day when the Christ will come back. So we got that going for us. "

After a quizzical look from Natalie, he adds, "or Buddha, or Allah, whoever floats your boat."

This is deeply messed up when he first says it, but maybe in the context of the whole film, we can look at it another way. When we can really “feel and hear all the suffering of mankind” (feel and hear it, not create it), when we can see that a mother losing her child in Baghdad suffers as much as a mother losing her child in Anytown, USA, or anywhere else in the world, then we will develop compassion. Then we will all become the Christ or the Buddha, or whoever floats your boat. Talk about a paradigm shift!

Perhaps we might find that when we embrace love and accept the "other" the world becomes a place we can all be from. That would represent a true AUMerican Dream Change, as my Gather friend Carolion Grailbear calls it.

Don't be too distracted by the broad and sometimes crude humor. That is only one of the masks. Just as there are hidden depths to Hauser, there are also hidden depths to this film. And it has a beautiful soul.

War, Inc. is available on DVD, Blu-ray, and now on iTunes.

John Cusack put my review of War, Inc. on his MySpace blog

I'm so stoked. John Cusack cross-posted my review of his movie War, Inc. from Progressive Blue to his MySpace blog after I sent him the link in a comment. Thanks, John. Just for that, I'm crossposting this like crazy.

Here's the review:

The Flicks Files: War, Inc. (2008)

The best new movie I've seen all year went almost straight to video after playing in a pathetically small number of theaters for a very short time. (Has anybody else noticed that Hollywood has been putting out some real crap this year? I'm not sure this corporate conglomeratization thing is working real well for them.)

The only new movie I've really cared about seeing this year was War, Inc., the bitterly biting satire of Halliburton-style war profiteering, which stars John Cusack, was directed by Joshua Seftel, and written by Mark Leyner & Jeremy Pikser & John Cusack. As might be expected by anyone who has become as cynical as I am in this land of the corporate controlled press, the movie struggled for distribution and promotion for a brief weekend or two in May, then was quickly swept under the red carpet. This, despite an all-star cast that includes Hilary Duff, Marisa Tomei, Joan Cusack, Ben Kingsley, and Dan Aykroyd.

Of course, we wouldn't want to jump to conclusions about the reason the movie "flopped." Maybe it was censored. Maybe it just sucked. At least, that latter explanation was one I was willing to entertain up until the point where I finally saw the movie this afternoon. No, it was censored. And that really pisses me off.

This movie has a great cast and a hilariously absurdist script. It's been said, probably in what little marketing there was of this movie, that it's the spiritual twin to Grosse Pointe Blank, but after seeing it, I felt like it was more a modern day Dr. Strangelove. There was a time in America, and it was not so long ago, when this movie would have been shown widely in the theaters, boycotted by some right-wing groups, and would have generated a storm of controversy in the press. In 2008, you hardly heard it whispered about. And that is much more scary.

Full disclosure here. I wanted this movie to succeed, artistically, even if not at the box office. The issue it discusses is of critical importance. Besides that, I really like John Cusack. I have liked him ever since my sister and I first cracked up laughing during a preview of Better Off Dead when we were in high school. I like him much more now that he's become an outspoken progressive blogger.

I've blogged about this movie before seeing it, which is pretty unusual for me, and I announced ahead of time that I would review it. Yesterday, knowing that I would probably get the DVD in the mail today, I was a little stressed out hoping that my honesty would not force me to give it a bad review. Fortunately, honesty intact, I can say that I loved it.

John Cusack's character in the movie, Hauser, is a corporate hitman for Tamerlane, a fictional Halliburton kind of company. He's sent to do an assassination in a fictional Middle Eastern country called Turaqistan, during the first American war completely outsourced to a private corporation. The movie opens with him doing a shot of pure hot sauce before a hit. This is one tough dude.

To pull off the assassination, he has to pose as the organizer for an American trade show showcasing the benefits of American corporate culture to a Turaqi audience. An inquisitive reporter for The Nation (Marisa Tomei) gets in his way. You get the feeling he might kill her, if he didn't start falling for her. As part of his trade show organizing cover job, he also has to babysit a bratty, oversexed Turaqi pop star (Hilary Duff). Fortunately, his hyper and perky yet menacing secretary (Joan Cusack) is there to help him do his job. It doesn't take too long before we start realizing that Hauser has some growing moral questions about his work.

Forget realism. If you're looking for an intellectual, balanced critique of American policy, you're not going to find it here. This movie makes its point by taking everything to an absurd, yet all too believable extreme. This is a sharp and cutting picture of the ridiculousness of extreme corporatization, where you can have a clandestine meeting in an undisclosed location hidden underneath a Popeye's restaurant.

The improbable relationships between Cusack's hitman, Tomei's progressive journalist, and Duff's pop star were risky. Initially I thought they were not going to work, because they just seemed way too unlikely, but in a few quiet human moments that were a haven in the madness of this movie, those relationships came together and actually became even touching. Hauser seems at times a little too nice to be a hitman, but at those moments, the character has a soul that you wish you could see evident in some of the members of the Bush administration. His capacity to question what he is doing ultimately makes him a sympathetic character.

The people who made this movie took a big risk to make an important point. Progressives will love it for its frank presentation of the huge problem America has with corporations that lobby our government so that they can make money through killing other people. Conservatives will no doubt screech loudly that John Cusack hates America.

At least, that's what I imagine will happen if the movie manages to be seen on DVD by enough people to even become a subject of discussion. See the movie, then go out and show it to others. This movie is a teaching opportunity, as Democratic congressional candidate Alan Grayson recognized while running in Florida's 8th District. Spread the word.

War, Inc. is rated R for some bad language, a little sexy stuff, and some pretty graphic violence. Given the subject matter, the violence makes sense, but be forewarned.

Watch the trailer:



War, Inc. receives the coveted Edge of My Seat rating in the black cat rating system, the highest rating possible.

Looking forward to War, Inc.

I've blogged about War, Inc. before. This is the satire of war profiteering starring John Cusack, Joan Cusack, Marisa Tomei, Hillary Duff, Dan Ackroyd, and Ben Kingsley, which I had been looking forward to earlier this year. I never got to see it, however, because it never made it out of a few cities in its theatrical release.

I tend to suspect it got effectively censored by corporate movie distribution due to the political message.

With a cast like that, it seems illogical that the movie wouldn't get wide distribution, even if it was truly bad. I don't know about the quality, because I still haven't seen it. The preview looks very funny.

Anyway, War, Inc. comes out on DVD tomorrow, Tuesday, Oct. 14th. I plan to review it later this week, so check back for the review. Probably the review will go up on Progressive Blue first.

And yes, I've been excited about this movie, because it's got a message I agree with and believe is important, but that doesn't mean I've come to a conclusion about whether it's a good movie before seeing it. I'll review it honestly, as I always try to do. Expect the review on Thursday or Friday. Unfortunately, I pre-ordered it from Amazon, and I don't think the shipment is getting here in time for me to do it earlier than that.