Live from Baghdad
Starring: Michael Keaton;
Helena Bonham Carter
Directed by: Mick Jackson
The timing could hardly have been better.
In the weeks leading up to the second U.S. invasion of Iraq, HBO released its made-for-television drama Live from Baghdad, a re-telling – alternately gripping and annoying – of the story that put Cable News Network squarely on the map: its coverage of Iraq and the bombing of Baghdad during the first Gulf War in 1991.
Apparently, co-writer Robert Weiner, the CNN television producer at the center of this film (played at times to great effect by Michael Keaton) had been trying to get this film made for the last ten years, but to no avail. In the end, it was a convergence of historical events that made the release of this film so appropriate.
From the beginning, this film moves along at a clipped, slightly manic pace, offering sometimes irritating assumptions that not every viewer may appreciate about the history of CNN – which, up until Gulf War I, was derisively known by the competition as “Chicken Noodle News”.
As it progresses, however, Live from Baghdad offers some poignant moments, most notably the interactions between Weiner and his crew, including Ingrid Formanek (Helena Bonham Carter) his steady friend, and Judy Parker, another friend and confidant (played by Lili Taylor). But the most interesting interactions in this film involve Weiner and Iraq’s cunning although sometimes sympathetic Minister of Information Naji Al-Hadithi (played by David Suchet).
In one of the film’s best scenes, Weiner is seen waiting patiently for a meeting with Al-Hadithi outside his office as other correspondents angrily come and go demanding to know why they cannot get an appointment to see the minister. Weiner is seen watching a portrait of Saddam Hussein being painted, bit by bit, until completion; hours after his arrival, he scores the interview he has been waiting for.
It is this tenacity and ability to roll with the punches that allows Weiner and his crew to get some of the best coverage of America’s largest military mobilization since the Vietnam War. Towards the end, the CNN crew even gets a prized interview with Saddam himself by Bernard Shaw (played by Robert Wisdom). “Nice tie,” says Wiener as he straps a microphone onto Saddam’s red tie. “Very nice.”
Interestingly enough, HBO was taken to task for this film by a media watchdog group called Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) for its depiction of babies being torn out of their incubators by Iraqi soldiers in occupied Kuwait. While allegations of such crimes were ultimately used as an incentive to go to war, they were never verified.
“In the month before the Gulf War began,” according to a FAIR press release, “media uncritically repeated the claim that Iraqi soldiers were removing Kuwaiti babies from their incubators. The story was launched by the testimony of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in October 1990. Eventually, as repeated by the media by the first President Bush and countless others, it blossomed into a tale involving over 300 Kuwaiti babies.
“What was not reported at the time was the fact that the public relations company Hill & Knowlton was partly behind the effort, and the girl who testified was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington. Subsequent investigations, including one by Amnesty International, found no substance for the claims.”
Also along for the ride are Richard Roth (now CNN’s senior diplomatic correspondent played by Hamish Linklater) and Peter Arnett (Bruce McGill). Roth plays the straight and narrow baby-faced reporter whose charm and diligence at times surprises even his more grizzled colleagues. McGill’s Arnett, meanwhile, doesn’t appear until the very end of the film when the crew watches in amazement from their room in the Al-Rashid Hotel as anti-aircraft gunners light up the night, shooting blindly at the American aircraft in the skies above.
Nothing, it should be noted, is mentioned about the reporting scandal that would later totally discredit Arnett in the world of journalism in the years after coverage of the Gulf War: his report on the so-called “Operation Tailwind,” later proven false, in which American forces allegedly used nerve gas against U.S. defectors in Laos during the Vietnam War.
Taken together, director Mick Jackson has made a noble effort in recreating and making sense of at least some of the chaos, suspense and bloodshed of the first Gulf War, while depicting skillfully the great lengths journalists have to go to get to the heart of a good story – without paying the ultimate price. What could have been helpful to the viewer would have been some kind of acknowledgement of Gulf War II, the circumstances leading up to it and what, if anything, Washington might have learned from its first clash with Saddam Hussein’s hi-tech police state.
