'Restrepo' documents Afghan war at human level

Try as it might to keep its distance from opinion and focus on the facts, "Restrepo" can't help leaving you with a sense of despair about the situation in Afghanistan.

While the documentary's co-directors, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, think the Iraq war was a mistake, they're more ambivalent about Afghanistan, and that leaves them playing idealists who are forced to recognize ugly reality.

"I had some major philosophical problems with Iraq, starting with the fact that it was undermining the war in Afghanistan," said Junger when he brought the movie to the Seattle International Film Festival last month.

"But then at the last minute this platoon got switched from Iraq to Afghanistan, and it was sort of 'game on' for us."

"War," Junger's best-selling book about his Afghan experiences, announces with its title that it's aiming for universal sweep. "Restrepo," which is named after a beloved, martyred medic, attempts a more personal approach.

Shot between 2007 and 2008, the film is based on several trips Junger and Hetherington took to Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, where they were embedded with U.S. soldiers over the course of a 15-month deployment.

In the end, several soldiers lost their lives, and the valley was abandoned. In a series of interviews, they talk candidly about their loneliness, boredom, friends who were killed, enemies whose hearts and minds have not been won, and the overwhelming sense that "I'm gonna die here."

One who did die there, "Doc" Restrepo, provides the movie and a local village with his name. Beloved by the platoon, he comes to symbolize the dehumanizing waste of military folly.

"What are we doin'?" asks a very young soldier who clearly has no answers.

The men pass the time transforming the platoon into a faux family, finding ways to deal with their fears ("sleeping pills don't take away the nightmares") and creating drawling, deadpan, slyly funny fantasies about ranch life back home.

A couple of soldiers share a mildly homoerotic moment, one recalls a strangely restrictive hippie mother, others bargain with an Afghan man whose cow they've killed. Under the circumstances, phoning distant significant others ("one last I love you") leads almost naturally to losing a train of thought or being overcome by emotion.

Much of this — the intense close-ups, the daily dance with death, the preoccupation with bodily functions — may remind you of "The Hurt Locker" or HBO's excellent, undervalued "Generation Kill." But if the territory seems familiar, Junger and Hetherington rarely fail to freshen it.

John Hartl: johnhartl@yahoo.com