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That visual manner grounds the film in harsh reality, reminding us that as funny as this movie often is, deadly issues are at stake in it. Two G.I.s carry on an intensely muttered argument over whether it is Lexus or Infiniti that carries a convertible in its product line, a discussion that is finally settled when they come upon a cache of such high-performance cars--including a stretch limo--in the middle of the Iraqi nowhere. Before that happens, though, we see Iraqi troops casually murder a mother in front of her husband and young daughter. We also hear a U.S. soldier being taught the difference between gold bullion and the cubes you make soup from. A pair of Iraqis avow that the U.S. is the Great Satan, but that does not prevent them from dreaming of becoming hairstylists there. Of course, they first have to dodge the footballs the Americans have wired with high explosives capable of knocking a helicopter out of the sky. But for all that, when a scoop-needy television reporter (Nora Dunn) insists that her stories, unlike those of a younger, cuter rival, are "substance-based" not "style-based," she could be describing this movie.
"Multilayered" is Russell's modest term for it; "genially bizarre" is the phrase that springs to a bedazzled critic's mind. Also, curiously enough, engagingly retro. For the 41-year-old director is a child of the '70s, who sees movies like MASH and Shampoo as models for the juxtaposition of serious issues and tossed-off comedy in contexts that keep the audience from settling into either mode.
Russell says he was also influenced by novelist Robert Stone, who was writer-in-residence when he was attending Amherst (class of '81)--so much so that he spent time in postrevolution Nicaragua seeking out the realities behind Stone's A Flag for Sunrise. He found them. "You'd be playing baseball or listening to an old Michael Jackson record and hear a gunshot. You wouldn't know if it was the contras arriving or just some guy who'd run a red light."
Obviously that experience influenced Three Kings. But Russell honed his transgressive chops with a couple of smart, sly independent comedies: Spanking the Monkey (about, of all things, incest) and Flirting with Disaster (about a man trying to find his long-lost birth parents). They were both chamber satires, on nowhere near the symphonic scale of Three Kings, which required a year and a half for Russell to research and write--sometimes nervously.
"I didn't want to spend 18 months writing this and then be sent away," he says. That didn't happen. Instead, as they used to do in the days of the movies Russell admires, a major studio risked major money (around $50 million) on what remains a film of determinedly independent sensibility.
We keep meeting the enemy on our various peacekeeping missions and discovering that he is very like us--wearing our sneakers and T shirts, lusting after our music, our gadgets, our more deadly hardware. As Russell notes, the son of Slobodan Milosevic even has an American-style amusement park up and running in what's left of the former Yugoslavia. This is not exactly what people mean when they talk about the American Century. But that's the way it has worked out. And David Russell has written its epitaph in blazing, user-friendly fire.