Few films have been made about the Gulf War. If all the films proposed have been like David O' Russell's Three Kings, it's hardly any wonder to me. I don't mean that last sentence to sound as though I didn't like the film. I enjoyed it a lot, yet I was displeased with the ending. It comes close, yet balks at actually elucidating, the serious message with serious repercussions that the film seems, at first, to imply.
Three Kings is, to me, a film about guilt. It was made by an American about American characters in a foreign land. Each character seems to grow in the film - much to our pleasure - but the film doesn't face the fact that as a nation, we did not really grow as the three men in the film did. In fact, the film moves away from reality as it moves toward a conclusion, leaving the passive viewer possibly appeased, but leaving the active viewer disturbed over the implications of the cover-up the film provides.
Our characters start the film as a broad swath of Americana. We have a hillbilly who can't help but act ignorant, a Detroit airport worker, a lower class 'working man's hero' who has a tentative great heart despite his jockish actions, and we have the washed out killer who finds, beneath his vicious and cold demeanor, a purpose in others. The journey each character goes through in the film is admirable, and the growth we see is just the kind of growth we expect out of our characters, moving beyond their personal foibles to a noble position. Following all of it is a vicious reporter who is past her never-all-that-stellar prime and is bitter because her "I don't get on my knees for a story" attitude hasn't really gotten her anywhere.
The film's narrative is one both of opportunism and growth, the story of men who find a chance, near the end of a justifiable (yet not so justifiable as it might seem) war, to steal some stolen gold. Like A Simple Plan, the money to steal is stolen, thus rightfully taken by the smart or at least cunning. Yet as the characters are stealing their booty, they are caught up in a noble pursuit of protection of the weak - ironically, they are caught up in the very task for which they "believed" they were coming to the desert anyhow.
It seems ironic to me that this small microcosm of America would, in the film, do what the force of the American army did not do in its visit to the Persian Gulf - namely, protect the weak. Rather, the army cleared way, reopened, the path so that America could continue its purchase of black gold from the area. And unlike the soldiers whom we cheer for in the film, the army did not stop to help the Iraqis endangered by their own aid to our war effort. In other words, the men and women who responded to George Bush's call for an uprising were left holding the bag once the United States had freed Kuwait.
Yet by the end of the film, we've forgotten that. It's as though the message was raised and then deemed too serious, too disturbing, too guilty to keep in the daylight, so it was shuffled across the border by the men who represented us - the broad swath of Americana I wrote of a few paragraphs ago. And who stands complicit with this sweeping under the rug, this hiding in the closet of our skeletal Iraqi rebel cousin? The media, the news hound, the woman who was looking for the 'good' story, who covered the 'heroic' story of the Three Kings, just as David O'Russell covered the 'heroic' story; they both left the shameful story in the closet, and we left the theater happy.