MOVIE REVIEW

Documentary filmmaker Michael Tucker looks at the war in Iraq from the ground up.

By Kenneth Turan, Times Staff Writer

Who in America, no matter how highly placed, couldn't honestly confess to Iraq information overload, to having taken in enough about that beleaguered country and its ceaseless crises to last several lifetimes? But no matter how Baghdad-ed out you may feel, make room for "Gunner Palace," a striking new documentary that shows the war in a way it's not been seen before: from the ground up.

The gunners of the title are the 400 or so members of a stationed-in-Baghdad U.S. Army artillery brigade that Michael Tucker (who co-directed the film with Petra Epperlein) spent two separate one-month periods with in 2003 and 2004.

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The palace in which the gunners are housed is no euphemism: It is the former pleasure dome of Saddam Hussein's son Uday Hussein, complete with swimming pool and putting green and located in the Adhamiya area of the city, one of the deposed leader's former strongholds.

Unlike the usual documentary procedure, "Gunner Palace" doesn't single out one or two soldiers to follow through the city's mean streets. What it aims for and achieves instead is a group portrait of today's volunteer army, what it's up to and up against in Iraq.

As opposed to the fulsome official rhetoric we hear from time to time on the soundtrack, "Gunner Palace" shows us what grunt-level existence is really like for beleaguered but unbowed U.S. troops. We see the grittiness and the tedium, the heightened unreality and the ever-present danger that make up day-to-day life in this peculiar war zone.

As one of the soldiers laconically puts it, "For y'all, this is just a show, but we live in this movie."

As has been often reported about Iraq, a surprising number of soldiers there are teenagers fresh out of high school from tiny hamlets described as "an atlas of forgotten America."

The kids who live in Baghdad's Gunner Palace would likely be unnerved by Los Angeles, so it's hardly a surprise that they couldn't be more confused and disconcerted by Baghdad's foreignness if it were the far side of the moon.

Adding to the difficulty of the situation is that the nature of the Army's current mission means that, as someone puts it, these artillery soldiers, "people who like to blow stuff up, are now policemen, social workers, politicians and truant officers," even, in one case, getting a glue-sniffing kid off the street before he gets into trouble.

Because "Gunner Palace" takes the broad view it does, we meet a whole range of soldiers, from the reflective to the self-absorbed. There are fathers who visit orphanages because they miss their own kids, and there are young guys proud to be 19-year-old war veterans in a place that provides entertainment "better than any movie, any sitcom."

There are goofballs who enjoy "scaring the natives" and one man who says simply, "I don't feel like I'm defending my country anymore."

As we see these guys go out on security missions, worrying about encountering IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and dreaming about visits to the airport Burger King, several things about the reality of the American mission in Iraq become inescapable.

The first is how easy it is for our troops to become overmatched by the reality of a place with a different language, religion and culture. The soldiers we see tend to be well-intentioned but beleaguered, frustrated by the limits of their effectiveness.

So an Iraqi woman who is in danger from terrorists is given the most desultory handgun instruction, and the Iraqi troops being trained do not look like they will be ready to defend their country any time soon, no matter what the politicians are claiming.

On the other hand, "Gunner Palace" unexpectedly makes you understand that, despite how unpromising it can all seem, it's due to something positive and determined in the spirit of these soldiers that things are not worse in Iraq than they are.

Co-director Tucker says in the press materials that he felt guided by the words of one GI's father, who told him, "Let me tell you how I can be so against this war and so for my son," and this in fact is the spirit of "Gunner Palace."

The soldiers in "Gunner Palace" are mostly without illusions of any kind, like the man who challenges the audience back home when he poignantly says, "You'll forget all this. The only people who'll remember it is us."

It is this film's accomplishment that it has made sure that won't happen any time soon.

'Gunner Palace'

MPAA rating: PG-13

Times guidelines: Considerable profanity

A Nomados Films production, released by Palm Pictures. Directors Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein. Producers Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein. Cinematographer Michael Tucker. Editors Petra Epperlein, Michael Tucker. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.

In limited release.