First off, here’s a bit of background info for orientation purposes. Lebanon is a film by an Israeli filmmaker set entirely inside a tank during the Lebanese War. The writer/director Samuel Maoz made this film to comment on his real life experience serving inside a tank during this war as a young man. I take it he didn’t much like the experience. The film opens on a still shot of an endless field of sunflowers and lingers there for a moment. This is the last time the camera will be outside the tank until the film’s end. After a moment we are in a dank hole, see a portal door close above us, and remain sealed in, just like the main characters, for the rest of the journey. The inside of the tank is dark and grimy. There is an inch of standing water on the ground. It’s claustrophobic, uncomfortable. Any view of the outside world we get from this point forward comes through the gunner’s scope. Everything we see is seen behind crosshairs. The world has, from this point forward, ceased to exist as anything more than a potential target. The four men that we are introduced to inside of the tank have no further purpose but to move and shoot on command. They are less people and more pieces of a machine; necessary components of a weapon in the Israeli army. Conceptually, the film is very strong. Its conceit is unique enough to be intriguing, and it is pulled off strongly enough to create a strong sense of place and mood. You feel dirty, you feel enclosed; you really get put in the same place as the soldiers and feel like you’re experiencing the war right alongside them. Thematically, the script knows what it wants to accomplish and sets everything up towards achieving that goal. Unfortunately, a strong concept isn’t enough to completely anchor a film. Somewhere along the line good characters and good story are going to need to come into play. And for Lebanon, they never do.
Shmuel (Yoav Donat) is the tank’s new gunner. It’s with him that we are dropped into the machine and his are the eyes that we see this world through. He’s joined by his soft touch commander Assi (Itay Tiran), the high maintenance ammo loader Hertzel (Oshri Cohen), and a young and wimpy driver named Yigal (Michael Moshonov). Before any sort of real orientation can take place they are given orders and find themselves accompanying a squad of troops as their heavy hitter. The problem with these four soldiers being the main characters is that they are by far the most incompetent, cowardly soldiers that I’ve ever seen captured on film. Their first assignment is to shoot out the engine of a BMW that is charging toward their troops and carrying gun-toting enemies. Shmuel botches the job, freezing up and not being able to get the shot off. Immediately his gun-shy gunner shtick is overbearing and too much to handle. He’s got the car in the crosshairs, but he just can’t bring himself to take the shot. He’s panting and wincing, almost having a seizure behind the tank’s scope. The moment is played as way too dramatic, the over acting sets in very quickly, and the film doesn’t look back from this point on. The situations that they are put in are horrible. Theirs is a life filled with death, violence, and moral compromise. The problem with their portrayals is that they don’t crack under the pressure; they fold immediately and spend the rest of the film back peddling and retreating. At no point does anyone in this film try to press forward and be courageous. At no point do they even display basic survival instincts. They’re lazy, self-centered cowards from the very beginning and seem completely willing to put their fates in the hands of their higher ups rather than try to fight their way out of a bad situation. At no point in the film do any of these men perform any small task in a competent way. The gunner can’t shoot, even when being shot at. The commander can’t earn the respect of his men, even in low-pressure moments of downtime. The driver can’t get the tank going, even when an ambush is imminent. I can’t remember the loader loading a single bit of ammunition during the entire film; he seems to just be there to question the commander’s leadership. It makes it completely impossible to have any sympathy for their plight. Forget about rooting for them whatsoever. Fifteen minutes into the film and I was wishing horrible, grizzly deaths upon them. As the film wears on and the situation never changes it becomes absolutely unbearable. I want to see them get tied up and tortured. I want the tank to flood with oil, ignite, and burn them alive. Anything to spare me of more time spent suffering their incompetence, anything to show that a complete unwillingness to strive for your own survival in a combat situation will result in grizzly consequences. Not to mention the fact that they constantly need to pee at the most inconvenient times. About half of this film is who needs to pee and when. It’s like taking a long car ride with a bunch of annoying children.
Tag teaming with the weak, ineffectual characters to irritate me to no end is the blatant, manipulative “war is bad” agenda that the film thrusts upon you. The plot is a loose construction of stand-alone moments exhibiting the horrors of war with absolutely no attention paid toward creating a story or developing three-dimensional characters. There is a scene early on in the film where our scope-o-vision focuses in on a dying farm animal. It’s horribly wounded and crying. The camera zooms in closer on the tears. You see, dying is bad. Pain makes you cry. Minutes later a ridiculous hostage scenario plays out where one or two confused enemy soldiers with assault rifles hold a family hostage in the middle of a bombed out urban wasteland. The commander orders Shmuel to fire on the soldiers and the family. His crosshairs aim dead center on the face of a five-year-old girl. Two scared, cut off soldiers up against a squad of Israelis and the order is to slaughter innocents with shellfire from a tank? They couldn’t have just thrown some gas grenades up there or something? Okay, whatever. Accepting that this sort of thing did actually happen, the whole scenario is still played out as over the top melodrama. By the time the grieving mother is stripped naked and threatened, seconds after her family was blown to bits, the “war is bad” stuff becomes so completely manipulative that you want to actively root against it and cheer the soldiers willingly doing the dirty work. And this scene could have worked, maybe, if it was properly built to and used as the big action/moral climax of the film. Instead it’s just a throwaway sequence about twenty minutes in. The constant repetition of these scenarios only serves to make them wear on you more and more. Every time they come across a new person they stare directly into the camera’s lens and give sad face. Every time they come across an innocent civilian they are callously ordered to be killed. It’s a conceit that has a law of diminishing returns. And when I didn’t get any returns the first time it means that by the end of the film the director owes me. The ineffectual nature of all of the emotional mumbo jumbo is compounded by the film’s visual style. Since the only glimpse of what’s happening outside comes to us through the scope, we are separated from it one more degree than we should be. It’s like the difference between riding a motorcycle and being in a car. When you’re on a motorcycle, you’re in the landscape; you’re a part of your surroundings. When you look at it through glass, when you feel no wind on your face, everything feels completely separate from you. Here, not only are we aware that we’re watching dramatization instead of documentary, but now we’re seeing it from someone else’s point of view. The camera doesn’t put us right next to what’s happening, it puts us back in the tank, far away, and through a looking glass. The effect bathes the proceedings in a feeling of unreality. When you start off with material that’s already manipulative and lame, and then film it in a distant, unaffecting manner, the chance that you’re going to respond to things emotionally becomes less and less likely. By the end of the film I was left thinking that this was the Crash of war films. And I’m not talking about David Cronenberg’s Crash either.
Not everything here is a complete loss though. As I said earlier, the film has a strong sense of setting and mood. If an actual story had been constructed to go along with the “the whole movie is inside a tank” gimmick, this could have resulted in something really special. The score here is minimal, modern, and very cool and very appropriate. The music ended up being one of my favorite things about the film. There is one good performance shoehorned somewhere in the middle. I wish I could have got who he was in my notes to give the actor credit. The characters refer him to as the Phalangist, and the cast list on IMDB has no such listing. Regardless, a Googling of the term Phalangist tells me that they were Christian Arabs who sided with Israel during the war. The man in this film is brought in to pick up a Syrian hostage after he attacks the tank with a rocket. There is a very tense scene where he threatens the hostage in Arabic, a language the other men in the tank don’t understand. He does it with a smile on his face, pretending to the protagonists that he has nothing but good intentions for the Syrian, but all the while threatening his genitals. The actor plays the sadistic character with relish, really projecting the anger and pain that have undoubtedly driven him to this point in his life. I wish the other actors, who all give similarly whiny performances had been energized by the performance and tried to inject some personality into their own characters. There is a moment somewhere else in the middle of the film where one of the characters delivers an awkward monologue about the day his dad died and how he parlayed it into an opportunity to dry hump his schoolteacher. It’s completely out of place and head scratching, and I think that was supposed to be the point of it. You know, to show the strange ways that people can react to extreme stress. But to me, the reason that it was completely out of place was that it was a moment that actually tried to develop a character. Surely, I can’t imagine that this was the effect that the filmmaker was going for. Yigal, the driver, at one point requests that his mother be called and told that he’s alright. Of course, as soon as this is accomplished, he is the first to die. Yes, it’s a horrendously over-used war movie cliché; but at this point it felt completely welcome. At least clichés are usually overused because they work. At least this was finally something happening other than a bunch of whining and panicking. Score one Lebanon.
