‘The Green Zone’: Some books aren’t really movies

Matt Damon’s The Green Zone opens today in theaters, and I’ve got to say : This movie looks nothing like Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City, the book upon which it’s supposedly based.

Here’s Slate’s Dana Stevens describing the movie:

As the camera jerked and joggled its way through an impossible-to-follow action sequence late in The Green Zone (Universal), I found myself thinking: “Damn, I’m sick of faux-documentary-style hand-held cinematography. This feels like ersatz Paul Greengrass at its worst.” Then I remembered: The Green Zone is directed by Paul Greengrass.

Wait. This is an action film? With spies and everything? But that’s nothing at all like Chandrasekaran’s book!

There’s very little action in Imperial Life in the Emerald City, to be honest: It takes place almost entirely in the “Green Zone” — the relatively safe area of Baghdad where American and Iraqi officials hid from the insurgents during the bloodiest days of the war therre — with brief forays out into nearby neighborhoods to gauge how “real Iraqis” are affected by the U.S. invasion. It’s first-rate reporting and writing, but it’s not a Matt Damon action thriller.

Bully for Chandrasekaran for selling the movie rights to his book. A more faithful translation of Imperial Life to the screen would’ve had to been done by somebody like M*A*S*H*-era Robert Altman — somebody who could take a cast of thousands and dramatize the not-exactly-front-lines absurdities of life in the Green Zone, where occupation officials were often chosen for their fealty to the GOP’s stance on abortion, say, rather than their knowledge of how to put a broken country back together. It could even play as a dark comedy! But Hollywood knows what sells, I suppose: Robert Altman movies stopped being widely successful 30 years ago (and Altman, of course, is dead) but gritty action flicks will live forever.