At the cinema, 2008 was the year when it was hip to depart from the moral outrage any conscientious individual might feel about our countries’ on going illegal and immoral war 6,000 miles away. Light satire, be it of the buddy (Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay) or “five minutes in the future, things will be even more remarkably FUBAR” variety (War Inc.) were fashionable. Stop-Loss, much like last year’s ill conceived Lions for Lambs, luke warm Rendition and sneakily powerful In the Valley of Elah, was too sincere for most audience members and a large swath of critics’ taste. On the other hand, did we really need Morgan Spurlock to go looking for Osama Bin Laden? What if he would have found him? That might have been a beheading worth watching.

Thankfully the much-maligned documentarian Nick Broomfield, best known for his perpetual work-in-progress (i.e. shoddily constructed), Tragic Musicians of the 90s Docs Kurt and Courtney (1998) and Biggie and Tupac (2002), finally surfaced with a genuinely terrific film. His 2007 TIFF entry Battle for Haditha, a picture that, in perhaps the year’s biggest cinematic surprise given its author’s dubious track record and relative inexperience in the realm of narrative, is so eerily verisimilar that it puts much of what one could accurately call combat cinema to shame.

Shot in grainy, fluid 16mm with Jordan doubling for Iraq, and starring non actors culled from local Iraqi refugees and ex-American military personnel, Broomfield’s movie paints a potent and altogether horrifying picture of American military brutality that would be fodder for the knee jerk responses of hawkish pundits if a) it had been seen by anyone; b) if its events weren’t almost entirely drawn from the documented atrocities of November 19th, 2005; and c) if it had been directed by Brian DePalma, whose Redacted could have been this relevant if its director wasn’t so busy navel-gazing and rubbing his bald spot.

With a structural conceit that resembles Gus Van Sant’s long build up to tragedy in Elephant (but with much less artifice and showy stylistic hijinks to burn), Battle for Haditha recounts not the 2005 battle for which it’s named (that took place in August of 2005 and featured the death of just about every marine from Brook Park, Ohio), but the massacre of twenty-four Iraqis, fifteen of them confirmed civilian noncombatants, by Americans servicemen out for revenge after a member of their platoon, Corporal Miguel Terrazas, was killed by an IED within the city.  That IED was initially listed as the cause of the fifteen civilian deaths in the military’s official report on the incident, only to be discovered as the mere spark for a clinical retribution on the part of a tired, emotionally scarred and trigger happy platoon. Broomfield paints the soldiers as limited and essentially decent men who, under the right circumstances, are subject to the worst human nature has to offer.

The film has a small share of inauthentic-seeming moments, which will always occur when you unleash an inspired non-performer in a set of dire given circumstances and make them create without a safety net. But even in the midst of these moments, the film retains its power to both enrage and enthrall. Especially riveting is former Marine corporal Elliot Ruiz as Cpl. Ramirez, whose rage spills over to needless violence with a ferocity that can be hard to watch at times, but whose vulnerability, his essential optimistic sweetness, breaks your heart. At times the performance seems designed to provoke a Liberal wussie’s worst suspicions about the men who serve us in uniform; in other moments, you completely fall in love with the man. It’s dynamite work, a fully lived-in sensation.

That those on both sides of any armed conflict are left wounded and this is no small thing might be Broomfield’s thematic intention, but his film transcends his schematic desires by putting us so equally in the shoes of combatants on both sides. It’s also leisurly enough to glimpse small moments with surprising restraint and unexpected beauty. From he sensuality of a woman removing her hijab to have intercourse and then a quaint shower with her lover, to a soldier watching as children flee their Madrasahs in the wake of the retaliatory massacre, Broomfield reveals himself to be a visual poet, albeit a minor one.

The banality of evil is the film’s (and this whole war’s) real subject, but as it floats between the daily routines of the platoon and various groups of Iraqi civilians (and a few insurgents), many of whom we know will not see another day, the film manages to truly put to bed Francois Truffaut’s notion that war cinema is always too visceral to be considered truly pacifist. I’m glad I’ve seen it and, deity willing, I never, ever want to see the real thing.