Kings maker

David O. Russell goes to war

The Gulf War? Which one was that? With world crises lasting as long as MTV videos, it's hard enough to stir any recognition with Kosovo, let alone Desert Storm. David O. Russell, director of Spanking the Monkey and Flirting with Disaster, does not feel that a familiarity with the 1991 conflict is prerequisite for appreciating his new Three Kings. A tale about US soldiers searching for stolen gold in the Iraqi desert shortly after the allies routed the forces of Saddam Hussein, it's being marketed as an action adventure with comic overtones.

"I don't think it matters if people are concerned about it anymore," he says. "I don't think that's why people go to movies. They go because they hear it's a good movie. It's funny, it's gripping, it's intense."

Which may be what a lot of the troops sent to battle Iraq expected. What they got, though, was more like what the heroes in Russell's movie first experience -- confusion, tedium, cynicism. Idle after the shooting war stops and unclear about what happened, George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Spike Jonze, and Ice Cube come across a map showing where stolen Kuwaiti bullion is hidden. While in the process of "liberating" the loot, they witness the brutal suppression of anti-Saddam Iraqi rebels. Greed vies with conscience -- not unlike the actual event.

"The point of view of the movie is from the soldiers who were there," says Russell. "At first, they're just partying, they're bored, and then they get in the middle of this. Initially the Iraqis seem like a bunch of mosquitoes, but then they end up heeding these people at a human level.

"I remember when the war started I was at Sundance, and I thought it was surreal, more surreal than any movie that was at the festival. You'd see these fireworks going off and I'd get a sick feeling in my stomach. When I researched it, though, I sympathized with the cause to some degree, even if we were motivated by oil. I think it was right to not let Saddam Hussein do this. But I also felt the way it was finished was not quite right. To let the democratic uprising just happen and let it be crushed. I think George Bush actually agrees with me, according to recent papers."

But, as they say, that's all history. More appealing to Russell and audiences is the surreality of the event, which is reflected in Three Kings' kinetic, layered, inventive style.

"There is a lot of texture, and that is why I jumped at this. I wanted to try something unusual with more layers. Like when they go into that bunker where they get the gold. Rodney King is on TV, an Eddie Murphy CD is playing, there's a giant painting of Saddam grinning and wearing a mortarboard on the wall, and an Iraqi soldier is offering George [Clooney] a Cuisinart. I love this idea of American consumer culture coming back through the lens of another country. Meanwhile, upstairs Spike Jonze is being ignored and a riot is starting. All these things are simultaneous, and that's what makes it funny and emotional. I thought, this is an amazing opportunity for me to depict the strange contemporaneity of this kind of environment."

Unlike the TV coverage of the real Gulf War, however, Russell doesn't spare the messier details. When the shooting starts, every bullet counts -- the trajectory is followed in slow motion to the target and into the body itself, the film clinically depicting ruptured organs, shattered bone, snuffed lives. "I just want to do it in a different way. I didn't want to have a kazillion bullets going off like they did in Private Ryan. I wanted every bullet to be felt."

-- P.K.

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