Water World

Another flick plays it safe with the Iraq war, while the emerging global water crisis offers real scares.

by Sam Adams

Recommended

LIFE DURING WARTIME: Michael Peña and Rachel McAdams star as roadtripping soldiers in The Lucky Ones. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Framed as a cross-country road trip by three American soldiers on 30-day leave from Iraq, Neil Burger's The Lucky Ones is less a movie about war than a movie about war movies. Echoing William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives, which followed the uneasy attempts of three World War II veterans to return to civilian life, The Lucky Ones hops into a rented minvan with Cheever (Tim Robbins), Colee (Rachel McAdams) and T.K. (Michael Peña) as they traverse a landscape at once familiar and foreign. But while Wyler's movie was a landmark of cinematic realism, Burger is after something altogether more polished and predigested.

Although there is precious little in the way of unfiltered footage from Iraq, Burger follows the conventional wisdom on Iraq fatigue and steers clear of potentially disturbing details. Although two of his three voyagers have been wounded in action, their injuries are mild compared to the soldiers who have returned crippled and scarred by roadside bombs and suicide attacks. The worst off is T.K., a brash know-it-all whose outwardly invisible wound has left him temporarily, and possibly permanently, impotent.

The three set off on a journey from New York to Las Vegas, with the ultimate goal of returning a valuable guitar to the parents of a dead soldier. On the way, they stop at Cheever's house, where the wife he thought waited for him for two years announces she can do without a husband. During his two-year tour, Cheever has become superfluous.

Most of the people they meet reflexively thank the soldiers for the service but there's a sense that no one knows what to say after that. In the military, they have a place and a purpose; at home, they have neither.

Burger and his co-writer, Dirk Wittenborn, don't add much in the way of specifics to their story: Apart from fleeting references to Tikrit and Anbar, the movie could as easily be set in the 1970s as the present day. Like Spike Lee's Miracle at St. Anna (see Cindy Fuchs' review) The Lucky Ones is oddly, almost pointedly generic, as if the best way to trick people into watching a story they've never heard before is to drape it in familiar clothes. (Rolfe Kent's inappositely burbling score sounds as if it might have been dubbed off a random sound-effects records.) Burger might succeed in getting people to sit through his movie, but those who do will emerge none the wiser.

The most alarming issue-based documentary in years, Irena Salina's Flow, is an unrestrained attack on the forces who would transform a basic necessity of life into a commodity available only to those who can pay the price.

Flow's primary target are corporations like Suez and Vivendi, who have privatized a substantial portion of the third world's water supply at the expense — and rarely to the benefit — of its poorest residents. In a remote South African hamlet, the villagers pay more per gallon than affluent city dwellers. Those who cannot afford to pay drink standing or polluted water, and frequently die from it. Americans, meanwhile, spend some $9 billion annually on bottled water. Given that the U.N. estimates the entire world could drink clean water for a third of what we spend on the bottled stuff, it might be a good time to invest in a Klean Kanteen.

Free-marketers will argue that they're backing projects that developing countries can't finance themselves and so deserve a return on their investment, but Flow points out that the World Bank forces countries to adopt inefficient large-scale solutions when a myriad of localized solutions would be more effective. As one observer says, "They know how to spend $1 billion in one place, but not $1,000 in a million places." Providing African villages with their own water-collection facilities makes more sense than laying miles of pipe to remote areas, but it removes the opportunity for profit. Like any anti-globalization doc, Flow eventually runs up against the impervious façade of its adversaries. But Salina provides enough examples of grass-roots resistance to send you out enraged and not defeated.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

The Lucky Ones | Directed by Neil Burger | A Roadside Attractions release

Flow: For Love of Water | Directed by Irina Salina | An Oscilloscope Pictures release