Text size:

'Standard Operating Procedure'

Rating:

BY RAFER GUZMÁN | rafer.guzman@newsday.com

April 25, 2008

There's a reason that Errol Morris, after 30 years of filmmaking, isn't a celebrity or "brand" like Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock. He doesn't mug for his own camera or force an agenda. Instead, he tells others' stories, nailing down facts while staying as objective as he can. It's an unfashionable approach. Folks used to call it journalism.

Morris' new film, "Standard Operating Procedure," shows why this approach still works. The pictures of bruised, sexually humiliated Iraqi detainees that emerged from Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 became fodder for the anti-war contingent, further proof that America's moral compass had finally shattered. But Morris - a Hewlett native - is less interested in what Abu Ghraib means than in how it happened. He interviews the perpetrators themselves, capturing their explanations, rationalizations and regrets.

What emerges is a picture of impressionable young soldiers who turned a blind eye to the crimes occurring around them but eventually - in a Mideast version of "Lord of the Flies" - joined the mob. Morris trains his unflinching lens on Lynndie England, the ciggie-smoking merrymaker who now looks hard and sounds bitter; on Sabrina Harman, who chronicled her actions and queasy conscience in handwritten letters to a lover back home; on Javal Davis, who details losing his once level head.

You probably won't find a more illuminating account of what happened within the walls of Abu Ghraib. Morris, who co-authored a book version of the film with Philip Gourevitch, touches on issues of government complicity and cover-ups, but it's the faces in his film that resonate. They're not monsters, maniacs or poster kids for a cause. They're people.

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE (R). Errol Morris goes straight to the source in his documentary on prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. 1:57 (profanity, nudity, images of torture). At Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and Angelika Film Center, Manhattan.