Standard Operating Procedure (2008)

User Rating:

7.5/10   

Director:

Errol Morris

Release Date:

29 May 2008 (Germany)

Genre:

Documentary | Crime | War

Tagline:

I wouldn't recommend a vacation to Iraq anytime soon

Plot:

Errol Morris examines the incidents of abuse and torture of suspected terrorists at the hands of U.S. forces at the Abu Ghraib prison. |

Plot Keywords:

Torture | Prison | Abuse | Testimony | American Officer

Awards:

1 win & 5 nominations

Cast

Christopher Bradley	...	Military Police (as Chris Bradley)
Sarah Denning	...	Military Police
Robin Dill	...	OGA
Joshua Feinman	...	Military Police (as Josh Feinman)
Jeff L. Green	...	Military Police (as Jeff Green)
Roy Halo	...	Detainee
Cyrus King	...	Military Intelligence
Alim Kouliev	...	OGA / Interrogator
Daniel Novy	...	Military Police
Zhubin Rahbar	...	Detainee
Shaun Russell	...	Military Police
Kami Shahab	...	Detainee
Robert Dill	...	Translator (uncredited)
Merry Grissom	...	Interrogator (uncredited)
Combiz Shams	...	Iraqi Detainee (uncredited)

Directed by
Errol Morris

Produced by
Julie Ahlberg	....	producer
Amanda Branson Gill	....	co-producer
Robert Fernandez	....	executive producer
Errol Morris	....	producer
Ann Petrone	....	co-producer
Diane Weyermann	....	executive producer

Original Music by
Danny Elfman

Cinematography by
Robert Chappell		(director of photography)
Robert Richardson		(director of photography)

Film Editing by
Andy Grieve
Steven Hathaway
Dan Mooney

Production Design by
Steve Hardie

Set Decoration by
John M. Kelly

Costume Design by
Marina Draghici

Makeup Department
Brad Look	....	key makeup artist
Donyale McRae	....	makeup artist

Production Management
Ron Ames	....	post-production supervisor
Laura Lyn Anderson	....	production supervisor (as Laura Anderson)

Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Shea Varge	....	second assistant director
Julian Wall	....	first assistant director

Art Department
Christopher Branan	....	carpenter
Jon Gold	....	property master
Daniel Turk	....	construction coordinator

Sound Department
Jeremy Bowker	....	sound editor
Dustin Cawood	....	assistant sound designer
Lee Dichter	....	sound re-recording mixer
G. John Garrett	....	sound mixer
Pete Horner	....	sound effects editor
Pete Horner	....	sound re-recording mixer
Marc Mann	....	midi transcriptions
Darren McKenzie	....	midi transcriptions
John Nutt	....	supervising sound editor
Randy Thom	....	sound designer
Dror Gescheit	....	sound re-recordist (uncredited)

Visual Effects by
Ron Ames	....	visual effects producer
Danny Braet	....	visual effects
Adam Gerstel	....	visual effects editor
Jesse Klein Seret	....	assistant visual effects editor (as Jesse Klein)
Stephen Lawes	....	compositor
Robert Legato	....	visual effects supervisor
Luke McDonald	....	visual effects
Nathaniel Park	....	visual effects editor
Richard Wardlow	....	visual effects

Camera and Electrical Department
Todd Avery	....	second assistant camera
Mark J. Casey	....	electrician
Joe Christofori	....	first assistant camera
Scott D. Davis	....	gaffer
Tim Driscoll	....	key grip
Dan Hutchinson	....	electrician
John R. Kaplan	....	grip
Abby Levine	....	digital imaging technician
John Vecchio	....	gaffer

Casting Department
Claire Benjamin	....	extras casting

Costume and Wardrobe Department
Carrie Dacre	....	wardrobe assistant
Roseann Milano	....	wardrobe supervisor

Editorial Department
Christine Carr	....	digital intermediate producer
Salvatore Catanzaro	....	on-line editor
Brad Fuller	....	co-editor
David Ian Salter	....	co-editor (as David Salter)
Karen Schmeer	....	co-editor
Jim Passon	....	color timer (uncredited)
Jorge Tanaka	....	digital intermediate assistant (uncredited)

Music Department
Pete Anthony	....	conductor
Michael Atwell	....	digital score recordist
Steve Bartek	....	orchestrator
Marc Mann	....	midi transcriptions
Darren McKenzie	....	midi transcriptions
Tim Rodier	....	music preparation
Shie Rozow	....	music editor
Dennis S. Sands	....	music scoring mixer
Edgardo Simone	....	orchestrator
Gina Zimmitti	....	music contractor

Other crew
Unjoo Lee Byars	....	title producer: Main/End Titles, Graphics
Maggie Causey	....	script supervisor
Erin Henning	....	production assistant
Raymond Hernandez	....	production assistant
Daniel Izui	....	production assistant
Zach Lazar	....	stage manager
Lindy Lucas	....	production secretary
Mike Mollica	....	production assistant
Sean Robert O'Keefe	....	production assistant
Daniel Polsby	....	assistant to director
Allan Rafael	....	set production assistant
Derek Rimelspach	....	production assistant
Ellen Stafford	....	producer: main/end titles
George Whitman	....	key set production assistant
Seth Kleinberg	....	technical producer: main and end titles and visual effects (uncredited)

Production Companies

• Participant Productions
• Sony Pictures Classics (co-production)

Distributors

• Sony Pictures Classics (2008) (USA) (theatrical)
• Sony Pictures Releasing (2008) (Germany) (theatrical) (subtitled)
• Sony Pictures Releasing (2008) (Netherlands) (theatrical)
• Cinema Mondo (2008) (Finland) (all media)
• LK-TEL (2008) (Argentina) (DVD)
• Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (2009) (Netherlands) (DVD)
• Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (2008) (USA) (DVD)
• Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (2008) (USA) (DVD) (Blu-ray)
• Sony Pictures Releasing (2008) (Argentina) (all media)

Other Companies

• Central Casting  extras casting
• Chapman/Leonard Studio Equipment  dollies
• Jeff Rosenman Casting  casting
• Prologue Films  titles
• Varèse Sarabande  soundtrack

Also Known As:

S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure (USA) (working title)
Untitled Errol Morris/Abu Ghraib Project (USA) (working title)

MPAA:

Rated R for disturbing images and content involving torture and graphic nudity, and for language.

Runtime:

116 min | Germany:118 min (Berlin International Film Festival)

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Certification:

USA:R | Canada:13+ (Quebec) | Canada:18A (British Columbia/Ontario) | Australia:MA | Germany:18 | UK:15 | Singapore:M18 | Argentina:13 | Netherlands:16 | New Zealand:R16 | Mexico:C | France:U (with warning)

Company:

Participant Productions

Trivia:

First documentary ever to be nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival (2008).

Goofs:

Factual errors: It's a common mistake to use standard instead of standing when referring to SOP, but SOP stands for Standing Operating Procedure not Standard. A good reference is AMC (Army Material Command) Reg 700-107.

Movie Connections:

Featured in "Siskel & Ebert & the Movies: (2008-05-03)" (2008)

Too narrow a focus

The well-known documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, who received an Oscar for his 2003 study of Robert McNamara and Vietnam 'The Fog of War,' has put the Abu Ghraib scandal under a microscope, but the result is too limited a picture of events.

Morris' film describes and shows the humiliations, the nude prisoners cuffed in stress positions or forced to masturbate or pile on top of each other with bags or women's underpants on their heads; the man they called "Gilligan" in the fringed blanket with the conical hat standing on a box with fake electrical wiring to his fingers; the howling dogs terrifying a squatting naked man and biting another's leg; the corpse of a man beaten to death packed in bags of ice.

The images, both stills and some fragments of videotapes, have a dramatic and quickly sickening effect. The circumstances of their taking is thoroughly explained. But the result is disappointingly narrow and obsessive, because Morris has allowed the low-ranking Americans implicated by the pictures, the majority of them concerned only with their own fates and future, to be the dominant voices of the film. The exceptions are a crude but more experienced interrogator, a precise but morally numb military investigator, and the angry general Janis Karpinski who was scapegoated because she was commander of the MPs.

Rory Kennedy's 'The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,' produced for HBO last year, has already presented all this information about the photo scandal--together with the larger context Morris has left out. Alex Gibney's 'Taxi to the Dark Side' thoroughly explored the larger implications--the responsibilities that go all the way up, the distribution of prison abuses throughout Afghanistan, Iran and Guantánamo, the violations of international law and the inadequacy of torture as an interrogation device. By specifically focusing on the beating and death of the taxi driver named Dilawar at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan Gibney showed much more detail than Morris about the specifics of one prisoner and the full extent of the physical brutality of US interrogators and guards. Anyone coming to Morris' film from Kennedy's and Gibney's will find it incomplete.

'Standard Operating Procedure' doesn't follow up on any Iraqis. Perhaps because Morris' mostly unheard questions were aggressive, his talking heads are always on the defensive, repeating that they were only "softening up" the prisoners as instructed. Lynndie England protests that she was in love with her boss, Charles Graner, and just did what he said. They do admit their process included sleep deprivation, hypothermia, loud noises, and also, when they lost patience or just felt like it, random physical abuse. We learn from the more experienced interrogator that his young associates were useless with high value prisoners. We also learn that no worthwhile information came out of interrogations at the prison. Karpinski explains how heavily overpopulated her prisons became, any suspects once held hard to release.

Morris commits several serious stylistic errors. He introduces fake basement-tape video reenactments (a device he has used before) to augment the visuals of the Abu Ghraib abuses--close-ups of "prisoners'" bodies, blood dripping on a uniform, keys going into a lock--so that after a while you aren't sure what is real and what is fake. The genuine images needed no enhancement, and this confusion is a terrible mistake. The score by Danny Elfman with its heavy-handed drumbeat sounds introduces frantic melodrama, also superfluous and in bad taste.

In fact Morris' material, which ought to have been allowed to speak for itself, is permeated by the banality of evil. The words of the MPs, including Megan Ambuhl, Javal Davis, and Jeremy Sivitz, as well as, most notably in this context, the two women amateur photographers, Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman, are notable for their lack of affect. There is no drama about them. Apart for one or two shaky expressions of doubt, awareness that all this wasn't right, especially on the part of Sabrina Harmon, writing to her "wife" Katie back home, they tend to speak as people going about what they believed to be their jobs; doing what others did and what everybody knew was being done at Abu Ghraib. Except, it seems, General Karpinski, because she was traveling from one prison to another, and says the ugliness was hidden from her. Perhaps it was. There's not much effort to question or puncture any of this testimony.

The film's title refers to the army investigator's conclusion that the majority of the photographed humiliations and punishments were "Standard Operating Procedure" and only certain scenes of physical injury could be classified as documenting crimes. This indulgence is something Morris does not explore further, however. 'Taxi to the Dark Side' goes much more thoroughly into the issue of torture. The distinction between torture and humiliation Morris alludes to seems less important than how the whole pattern of sordid conduct at the prisons get started, a topic 'Standard Operating Procedure' doesn't investigate. We have just had President Bush's admission that he knew and approved high-level meetings inside the White House on harsh interrogation tactics. Morris does not set the Abu Ghraib scandal within this larger framework.

We do hear that children were imprisoned and that there were children raped by prisoners and the prisoners were beaten and injured for that. We're briefly told that methods were transferred to Abu Ghraib from Guantánamo. It's all prefaced by a description of what a disgusting place Abu Ghraib was when the MPs and other American staff came to live there--with constant bombardment, because, in violation of international law (but we are not told that) Abu Ghraib was not behind the lines. This is presented elsewhere by some as mitigating circumstance. The low-ranking Abu Ghraib scandal scapegoats were not only just following orders (or "S.O.P."); they were under stress. Stuff happens. Here again, Morris doesn't connect the dots. Some will like that. The much admired, often awarded Morris is a sacred cow. But this time his result seems more repulsive than effective.