Ich bin ein Berlinaler

Martin Scorsese's documentary about the Rolling Stones, "Shine a Light," opened the festival on Feb. 7, and while the picture's glamour quotient may be high -- these are the Rolling Stones we're talking about -- the movie itself is self-serving and mechanical. Scorsese filmed the Stones over two nights of live performances in 2006 at the Beacon Theater, the rock-'n'-rollers' old folks' home on New York's Upper West Side. (Hoping to catch that "Ten Years After" reunion tour? This is the place.) Actually, I have a soft spot for the Beacon, and for old rock-'n'-rollers: Not even Elvis could stay young forever, and it's a challenge for any of us to not fade away.

But while I'm glad Mick Jagger is healthy and seemingly happy, I'm not sure I want to watch two hours' worth of his leaping and twisting through songs that I actually love for their, oh, emotional content? Structure? Pure animal expressiveness? I've never seen the Stones live, but friends who have always come back with glowing reports of how much energy Jagger still has. That's clearly what Scorsese seeks to capture here. Working with an A-team of cinematographers (including Robert Elswit and Ellen Kuras), with documentary-god Albert Maysles lending a hand as well, Scorsese seems preoccupied with celebrating the wishful thinking of his (and, increasingly, even my) generation. Every frame of "Shine a Light" is an exhausting shout: "Look at how old these guys are! And yet they're not really old!" Scorsese also rustled around in the attic and found some old interview footage of the young Jagger responding to bland questions about how long he'll go on doing this rock 'n' roll thing, to which he responds, honestly if with a bit of feyness, that he'll go well into old age.

That's all well and good, but Jagger's leaping and prancing comes off as a kind of "Red Shoes"-style obsessiveness, and Scorsese treats that as a good thing -- with this movie he has bottled it for the ages, an elixir from which we all want to drink. But no one wants to think about how all that jumping around affects Jagger's phrasing. As I listened to him recite his way through "As Tears Go By," like a schoolboy proud that he has memorized all the words, I felt as if he were reading the text from the side of a box of bran cereal. The song's poetry seems to mean nothing to him. And sue me: While I love Keith Richards enough to listen to him sing (as he does here, though thankfully just one number), I still wanted more of Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts, who don't move around so much but who always captivate me regardless. There's lots of running and jumping in "Shine a Light." Just not enough standing still.

Errol Morris' "Standard Operating Procedure" is a detailed -- though, in the end, somewhat limited -- examination of the Abu Ghraib scandal told largely in the voices of the soldiers who took, and appeared in, those haunting and horrifying photographs. As a document if not as a movie, "Standard Operating Procedure" is useful and edifying for the way it pulls together a timeline of what happened at Abu Ghraib (the film provides an overview that's impossible to grasp by looking at the pictures alone) and for the way it confirms that the members of the military who were punished for the scandal, the underlings, couldn't have been the only ones involved: They were participants in the prisoners' torture and humiliation, but they weren't the architects of it. If nothing else, Morris' picture raises the question of who those architects might be -- a question he can't and doesn't attempt to answer, although he at least opens the door to it.

Yet I can't help being appalled at the way Morris applies such relentlessly tasteful filmmaking to such a horrific subject. He turns his camera on many of the principals involved in the scandal: the baby-faced Sabrina Harman; the inscrutable Megan Ambuhl, who comes off as simultaneously bland and calculating; and Lynndie England, who, after serving a portion of her three-year sentence (she's now out on parole), betrays so little about what's going on in her heart and in her brain that she barely registers as a human presence. (Charles Graner, the ringleader of this not-so-merry band, is still serving his 10-year sentence; the military wouldn't allow Morris to interview him.)

Plenty of people respect Morris' tactic of turning the camera on his subjects and letting them talk, largely unfettered by the presence of an interviewer. (Morris does interject in a few key places here.) But the result is a kind of faux objectivity, a disingenuous, who-me? statement from a guy who wants us to believe he has done nothing more to shape this material than just turn the camera on. Morris does believe he's giving these players a fair shake -- he said as much in a press conference here: "These guys are not the culprit and these photographs are not the entire story of what happened there," he said. "We are looking at a very dark and disturbing chapter of American history and something that does reflect deeply on my entire country."

But if Morris really feels that way -- and I'm not even questioning his sentiments -- then what's wrong with a little subjectivity? Why should he -- or we, for that matter -- feel we have to be objective about England, as we gaze into her flat, dead eyes and listen to her flat, dead voice? Perhaps Morris believes he's letting some of his interviewees hang themselves, but it's his very lens that hands them the rope. The gist of their explanations for their behavior basically amounts to "Um, well, we kind of knew it was wrong, but we did it anyway. And now we see how bad it was." It may be edifying, but it's not vindicating.

I'm not crazy about Morris' penchant for fictional re-creation of events (a tactic he uses frequently here). But I have much more difficulty with his arty visual interjections. A soldier describes appearing on the scene as one of the Abu Ghraib prisoners is dying. The soldier says a drop of blood fell on his uniform -- and I'll be damned if Morris doesn't show us a beautifully lit, semitranslucent droplet of blood, magnified a bajillion times, falling in slo-mo on a crosshatching of uniform cloth. (When you're Errol Morris, this is what you keep a great cinematographer -- in this case, Robert Richardson -- around for.)

What on earth is that heavily art-directed droplet (and the movie includes plenty of other similar visual touches) doing in a documentary about such a horrific crime against humanity? The most effective and chilling elements of "Standard Operating Procedure" are the Abu Ghraib pictures themselves. No matter how many times we've seen them, they retain their power. Against those, Morris' photography-exhibit blood droplets mean nothing. A picture is worth 1,000 words -- but it all depends on the picture.

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