Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris (The Fog of War) has made some truly outstanding documentaries. His latest, Standard Operating Procedure, might just be his best yet. Probing, insightful, focused and sometimes highly inflammatory, Morris is unafraid to go right to the very heart of the matter in his films and this one is no exception. Really, the only issue this time is whether or not people are going to take the time to watch it, this examination of the ghastly incident in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib’s prison not exactly a subject most audiences stateside appear ready, let alone willing, to ponder.

Errol Morris goes inside Abu Ghraib Prison in Sony Pictures Classics' Standard Operating Procedure

Pity, because few pictures make the case more clearly about the how clueless those in the highest echelons of military power have continually been during this infernal conflict then this one does. Like last year’s Academy Award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, this film isn’t so much about abuse as it is about lack of leadership, the soldiers convicted and accused of the heinous acts on display only one piece of a puzzle the government appears to not even remotely want to see get solved.

This is a grunts-eye view of the way things are on the ground, and while this particular group’s collective stupidity certainly isn’t in question the fact those in command allowed, maybe even promoted, the behavior going on behind the walls of the prison is almost completely unfathomable. As the film progresses I couldn’t help but wonder what I would have done in the same situation, and while I’d like to think I’d have the moral decency to rise above events and do the right thing by bringing them to an immediate halt the fact Morris does such an eloquent job of making viewers question it shows just how deep this sickening quagmire really descends.

The director manages to secure on-camera interviews with five of the seven MPs indicted for their actions at Abu Ghraib, Megan Ambuhl, Javal Davis, Lynndie England, Sabrina Harman and Jeremy Sivitz (the other two, Ivan Frederick and Charles Graner, in prison at the time of shooting). They all speak openly and bluntly about the scandal and their roles within it, none of them asking for forgiveness yet all trying to find a way to lessen their personal culpability.

(Some have made the case the fact Morris paid them for the interviews lessens or colors their historical value. I tend to disagree, this is a film, not a nightly newscast, and if anything the fact their being recompensed for their stories only gives each soldier added impetuous to be truthful and not hold anything back.)

Some will find all this more than a bit unseemly. Morris holds nothing back, his recreations almost exhausting in their excruciatingly nauseous detail while the hundreds of photographs themselves are so sickening the turned my stomach to constantly rampaging oceans of intestinal Cottage Cheese. Danny Elfman’s (The Kingdom) pounding score only heightens the uncomfortably building tension, pounding home the director’s themes with all the subtlety of a powerfully undulating jackhammer.

Yet this worked for me. I was struck by just how much about these ominous and disgusting images we were not told about, how much more there was sitting outside of the frame that was cropped and left unexamined. I also found it stupefying how easily it was for this group of people to so easily slip into a world of torture and degradation, the utter idiocy of photographing themselves doing all of it easily one of the more truly mind-blowing forms of self-destruction I think I’ve ever seen.

The real outrage I feel hear is for those who allowed all this to happen. I’ve had people close to me go to Iraq and all of them have come back wounded in one way or another. Conflict and war is tough enough, but when the men and women we send to fight and die over there are faced with conflicting orders and asked to engage in tactics bordering on the insane who are we to be surprised when the outcome looks a lot like the immorality conducted at Abu Ghraib?

But maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. As more than a few professional interrogators and investigators interviewed in the film point out, under the current administration these policies aren’t just endorsed, they’re the standard operating procedure.

Film Rating: êêê1/2  (out of 4)

Additonal Links:

-  Interview with director Errol Morris (coming soon!)
-  Standard Operating Procedure Theatrical Trailer