Standard Operating Procedure

A potentially great documentary blundered. Over the last twenty years Errol Morris has refined his eccentric style into an effective sort of extended interview with illustrations. Usually, his curiosity, being both lustful and indiscriminate, catches sight of the extraordinary and the strange, making their utter weirdness seem plausible and natural while emphasizing, at the same time, their complete and total impossibility, e.g., Rick Rosner or McNamara, or the ticking egg sequences in A Brief History, or the deadpan pathos and expense--emotional and financial--in burying a pet.

But the strategy has one fatal flaw. Morris invests so heavily in his living, talking subject that a dull or unreflective or unsympathetic person, being him or herself both the study and the structure of the medium, can compromise the film's integrity or appeal. Here, a politically and morally charged content sputters and collapses into political and moral complacency under the ineffectual disinterest of its subjects. None of the men or women interviewed shows any real insight into or regret for the dishonorable actions at the Abu Ghraib detention center, and only a fast-talking outsider, who provides the much needed but too infrequently employed moral perspective, actually makes the film move forward.

At best, this failure is boring and uninformative. At worst, it obliquely collaborates in the crime. Fumbling this kind of pass can lose superbowls, and if you'll pardon the contrived and indecorous metaphor, Errol Morris really dropped the fucking ball here.