Son of It Came From the Queue!
Now Playing: The Battle of Algiers (1965); Murderball (2005)
I finally got around to watching the Criterion release of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, and suffice it to say I was pretty much blown away. I’m not sure why I put off watching it since its DVD release several months ago; I suspect it had to do with not wanting to set my expectations too high from reading all the pieces touting its impact and relevance. Could a film from 1965 retain the visceral punch of the most powerful political filmmaking even for today’s war-weary audiences? And then some.

Raw, angry, and vital, not only does Pontecorvo’s masterpiece still hold the ability to shock, I wonder whether it would even be shown in the US today were the names of the players changed to the US Army and Iraqi insurgents. Right down to the minute details, viewers cannot help but be struck by the similarities between the efforts of the French military to suppress the uprising by the Muslim terrorist organization FLN in 1950’s Algeria and our own current imperialistic misadventure in Iraq. From the use of women as terrorist bomb delivery vehicles to the use of torture by the occupying forces, it’s astounding how analogous the situations are.

As angry as it is (and few films I’ve ever seen come close), the film stops just short of propaganda. The French are by and large portrayed not as bloodthirsty sadists, but as military men trying to carry out their orders in difficult, if not impossible circumstances. Pontecorvo is unflinching in depicting not just their brutality, but that of the revolutionaries as well. Even though he sides with the anti-colonial aims of the revolutionaries, Pontecorvo depicts the escalation of violence evenhandedly, with a sense of both its inevitability and its dehumanizing effect on everyone involved. He can, perhaps, be forgiven for ending the film with an epilogue celebrating the eventual victory of the Algerians—in 1965, revolution was in the air, and no one wanted to believe that they were fighting for transitory victories. Four decades later, however, the powerful sense of d?j? vu the film imparts is tempered with another, sadder sense: that humans, unable or unwilling to learn the lessons of history, may be forever doomed to keep repeating the mistakes of the past.

The trailer from Rialto’s 2004 re-release of the film, included on Disc 1, imparted two tidbits I found fascinating. One was that no documentary footage was used in the film. Some of the footage is so expertly shot (and some inconsistencies in the film stock throughout help the illusion) that I had assumed that it was in fact actual archival footage. The other was that the film had been recently screened at the Pentagon. How anyone can watch this film and come away with the notion that a war between superior military forces and entrenched guerillas is “winnable” in any sort of traditional sense is beyond me. Then again, the President’s gaggle of neoconservative yes men must have come away from the film with a different message than I did. Perhaps they felt that the French lost because they didn’t blow up enough civilians, or didn’t go far enough in torturing their captives.



The documentary Murderball, despite the stated intentions of its filmmakers, does drive home the fact that its quadriplegic rugby-playing subjects are pretty much just like normal folks. It does this not through its depiction of the players, but by resorting to the familiar tropes and plot movements of just about every sports-related documentary ever made. The narrative is shaped to set up a conflict between Mark Zupan, one of the most hardcore players of what no one who has seen the film will deny is a pretty hardcore sport, and Joe Soares, a fierce competitor who spitefully became the coach of the Canadian Olympic team after being cut from the US squad. We’re shown only the matches that set up the familiar sports-movie dramatic arc: underdog Canada beats confident US; US comes back to win in a pre-Olympics match; big grudge match looms large for the film’s climax. And even though actual events didn’t give the filmmakers the “one match for all the marbles” ending they clearly wanted (the US and Canada met in a semifinal at the ’04 Paralympics in Athens, not in the gold medal round), they shape the narrative so that it has that effect.

Having said that, the fact that Murderball is such an enjoyable film is largely due to the outsized personalities of the players. These guys are pretty much high-level jocks, and confinement to a wheelchair doesn’t change the personality traits necessary to achieve on that level. As one of Zupan’s friends puts it, “Mark was pretty much an asshole before the wheelchair, so I can’t say that had anything to do with it.” It may be eye-opening to see quadriplegics hitting each other, getting drunk, and having hot girlfriends (one of the film’s most hilarious sequences happens when one player details the lengthy conversational process whereby girls he picks up finally get around to asking if he is able to have sex), but it’s the personalities that keep the film enjoyable throughout. Tripartite named filmmakers Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro include a couple of moving subplots about a recently injured young man coming to terms with his paralysis and Zupan’s troubled relationship with Christopher Igoe, the high school friend responsible for the accident that injured him; but the focus is mainly on the players themselves in the context of their sport, and that’s as it should be. Rubin and Shapiro let the personalities shine through, and by the end of the film, you do feel as if you know these guys a little. Soares complains in one of the DVD’s supplements that he’s portrayed somewhat inaccurately, and I agree that the narrative paints him as an antagonist. But it’s clear, despite his frequently obnoxious behavior, that he is a person who loves his family deeply, and whose considerable pride was wounded when he was rejected by his team.

Murderball is certainly enlightening for those of us who have not known a person with such a disability; and it’s uplifting, for those that crave that sort of sports movie. But mostly, it’s just fun to hang out with these guys a little bit. You get the sense that they’d be a fun group to have a beer with…as long as you didn’t take them on in any sort of competition. There’s no new ground being broken here, but it’s a solidly made, thoroughly entertaining film that stays true to the humanity (in all senses, positive and negative) of its subjects. And that’s definitely worth something.