Three Kings (Warner Bros., Village Roadshow Pictures, Village-A.M. Partnership, 1999)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I ran a movie last night at about 9:20 p.m. called Three Kings, made in 1999 by director David O. Russell – he not only directed it but wrote the screenplay as well, though John Ridley came up with the original story. It’s set during the first Persian Gulf war before there was a second one, and it was amazing how young stars George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg looked on screen. They were the principal white characters and they, along with the film’s token Black, Ice Cube, hatch a plot to steal millions of dollars in gold ingots Saddam Hussein had ordered his men to steal from the government of Kuwait after the war is officially over and Our Anti-Heroes find a map giving the location of the bunkers where the Iraqis stashed the loot. The film turns into an odd reworking of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, as the three protagonists increasingly get on each other’s nerves – it’s well known that, among other things, George Clooney considers himself the Humphrey Bogart lama (one of his films, The Good German, even ripped off the famous poster from Casablanca) and so it’s not at all surprising that the Ridley-Russell script turns into a Bogart-esque morality play in which the three scapegraces grow consciences, they give the gold away to anti-Saddam Iraqis and in the final scene help them flee across the border into Iran even though this breaks official U.S. policy against negotiating anything with Iran. (Not only did Iran offer asylum to fellow Shi’a Muslims during the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988 and beyond, but when the U.S. finally invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam in 2002 most of the people we put in charge of running the country after that survived Saddam’s terror by fleeing to Iran.)

Three Kings was advertised as a dark comedy, but as with the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink I kept asking myself, “I get the darkness, all right, but where’s the comedy?” It’s full of scenes indicating the horrible brutality of war – Three Kings is not your movie if you recall the (first) Gulf War as a triumph of good over evil, and “nice” Arabs (the Kuwaitis and their allies in Saudi Arabia) against the “nasty” Arabs from Iraq. It helped the film a great deal that a fourth servicemember (Spike Jonze) ends up mortally wounded and, though he’s insisted he’s a Christian all his life, asks to be taken to a Muslim cemetery in Qom, Iran at the end because he’s so impressed by the Arabs’ version of heaven. And for me, the most interesting character was a woman, NBS reporter Adriana Cruz (Nora Dunn), who when we first meet her is incensed because the male Army officer who’s supposed to be her escort is actually screwing a younger, hotter reporter from another organization. She ultimately turns the tables on him and insists on driving their dune buggy through the desert and picking the stories she wants to cover – including the desperate struggle of Our (Anti-)Heroes to keep their charges across the border to safety in Iran against the demands of U.S. goverment officials to arrest them at the Iraq-Iran border and take their own soldiers into custody for violating tine U.S.’s interdict against any official or semi-official contact between the U.S. and Iran.

Three Kings is sometimes an off-putting movie (the scenes of Spike Jonze’s Iraqi captors torturing – oops, using “enhanced interrogation techniques” on – him are especially “much,” and so is the sequence of an Iraqi woman getting shot to death in the head and leaving her husband and their daughter bereft, which was deleted from the Australian release to keep tie film from getting an "R" rating) and it’s definitely not your movie if you want to see war (and this war in particular) as a black-and-white morality play. But on its own terms it works beautifully even though already in his career George Clooney was striking notes of taciturnicity that would eventually leave him, in the late Douglas Sirk’s term, “petrified.” (My husband Charles read the above and offered some corrections: it was Mark Wahlberg's character, not Spike Jonze's, who was subjected to "enhnaced interrogation" by the Iraqis, and Geporge Clooney's character who was suspposed to be mindiung Adriana but was actually fucking the other reporter. My apologies for my errors.)