November 5–12, 1998

movie shorts

The Siege

Directed by Ed Zwick
A 20th Century Fox release

The Siege begins with a noble motive, as an attack on the racist hysteria and jingoistic rhetoric that accompanies American anti-terrorist initiatives. But it's also an action movie, where the bomb explosions are just escalating money shots, and higher intentions are swept away in a tide of cliché and standard operating procedure. Edward Zwick, the director, is one of the last old-style liberals left in Hollywood; he wants to preach tolerance to the masses, but he wants it to taste good, too.

Zwick's last movie, Courage Under Fire, got the mix exactly right. A tightly unfolding thriller which played off conflicting versions of the same event, it also served as an effective critique of the spirit (if not the substance) of the Gulf War. With The Siege, the mix is too much sugar and not enough salt. Written by three writers this time, the movie is too incoherent to offer much more than vague platitudes, and the story is structured according to conventions that are designed to shed meaning, so worn out they serve only as reminders of other movies.

Denzel Washington (also the star of Courage) plays Hubbard, a Manhattan FBI agent whose task force is assigned to investigate a series of terrorist bombings. The film plays interestingly for a while with the fact that the bombers' identities are unknown. The driver of a bus they've taken hostage says he "thinks they're speaking Arabic," but they phone in no warnings and their only demand is an unsigned fax stating "Release Him"—without identifying the "him." But after what you hope is a set-up in which Hubbard and the rest of his force automatically assume the terrorists are Arabs without any supporting evidence—à la Oklahoma City—the terrorists turn out to be… militant Islamic Arabs.

It's hard to discern whether what hampers The Siege is a failure of imagination or a failure of nerve, but it amounts to the same thing. It makes vague counter-establishment noises, but The Siege ends up confirming everything most people already think they know: all terrorists are Arabs, and the government is, barring a few bad apples, just here to help.

As the attacks escalate, the government's response becomes more severe, culminating in the imposition of martial law by a woozy Bruce Willis. (Maybe he's supposed to look troubled.) With the terrorists traced to Brooklyn, the borough is sealed off, and all Arabic males of a certain age are rounded up and detained in chain-link holding pens. The film makes little effort to dramatize the experiences of the innocent people who are shut up like animals, merely giving Hubbard a Palestinian partner (Tony Shalhoub) who predictably bemoans the situation but helps hunt down the bad guys anyway.

Worse, The Siege is alarmingly naive and catastrophically sloppy when it comes to tying its hypothetical story into the documented past (which is the point of political storytelling—to show how what we have done can lead to what we might do). Apart from a brief voiceover snippet, no mention is made of the fact that the U.S. Army herding citizens into internment camps based solely on race is not a matter of hypothesis but of history.

Those figures who, like Willis' General, act badly, act as rogues, not as products of a culture. In fact, everyone seems to act alone. At times, you'd think the entire U.S. law enforcement and military culture consisted of about a dozen people. The Siege is consistently small-scale, both in thought and execution. For a movie about what would be the largest domestic military operation in the country's history, it spends a lot of time in closed rooms with a handful of extras, and the idea of troops on the streets of Brooklyn never fully takes hold. And the idea that martial law might be something some Americans are not only willing to endure but would actually prefer, that many would gladly give up their civil rights if it would make them feel safer—well, that never quite takes hold either.

—Sam Adams