War and Justice (Gentile and Vetter, 2023)
War and Justice suffers a bit too much from Well-Intentioned Documentary Syndrome.
It is one of those films with a serious, self-evidently important topic (the International Criminal Court) that struggles to make a claim about that topic that isn’t so broad that it borders on superficial. Settling things in court is better than settling them through war. Absent a higher power to coerce cooperation and enforce verdicts, the ICC is limited in what it can do to fulfill its mission. The horrors of war scar us individually and communally, but not enough to make us disavow it when it is perceived as being in our best interest.
The film boasts “unprecedented” access to Ben Ferencz, the (at the time of filming) last living prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials. Ferencz helped found the ICC, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC’s first prosecutor, and Karim Khan (the current ICC prosecutor) also feature prominently in the film. With such a reservoir of historical knowledge and political experience, one might expect the film to dive deep into the arguments surrounding national sovereignty, human rights, and their evolution.
But a great film, like a great meal is not just the result of having quality ingredients. Those ingredients must be put together in a purposeful way to create a coherent narrative or argument. Ultimately, I was not sure whether or not the film was meant to be a history lesson, a profile, or a political argument. As more and more recent conflicts are folded into the narrative, any differences between them get glossed over in favor of a “war is bad” message. Easy enough to agree, but is that the sum total of the argument?
It is, but is there no difference truly between Russia invading Ukraine, Germany invading Poland, and Israel battling Hamas. If the common thread is that all conflicts lead to human rights abuses, is that a sufficient argument for why war can never be appropriate or necessary?
There could be, I think, some fascinating profiles here if the subjects were induced to speak more freely. But they have, understandably, lawyers’ caution when pleading their cases. I wondered what the psychological and spiritual effects of toiling at such a noble cause with so very little support would do a sane human being, Unfortunately, War and Justice stays buttoned down, never much deviating from its tone of hushed respect for the lawyers and the work they do.
On March 17, 2023, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for war crimes committed during the Russian hostilities against Ukraine. Did anyone outside of the ICC notice or care? Did the fact that they had done so materially impact international or domestic foreign policy for any country? If so, it is hard to see how. That’s not intended to be cynical. It’s just that rather than making me more hopeful about the progress of human rights, the film left me wondering if war crimes can only ever be adjudicated after the fact. Ferencz says that war itself is a crime, but the evidence of the history shown in the film may well be that war crimes can only be prosecuted after war has provided a resolution for the conflict that led to it.
The Arts & Faith website recently published its list of the Top 25 “spiritually significant” films about Crime and Punishment. Because I have been working my way through the films on that list, I have been reflecting on court systems and the way they interact with human questions about morality and justice. In great crime and punishment films, there can also be an examination about differences and similarities between individual crimes and corporate crimes, between those born out of desperation and those born out of frustration. We see in the list films that explore whether courts can correct injustices, prevent injustices, or (when embedded in corrupt systems) even perpetuate them. Crime and Punishment is a subject so wide that even a list of twenty-five films doesn’t exhaust everything to be said about it. I was hoping, especially on the heels of re-watching Judgment at Nuremberg, that War and Justice would deepen my appreciation for and understanding of the events depicted in that film. Instead, it just spirals out in too many different directions.
War and Justice is not a terrible film, but absent a more focused approach, it might have worked better as a thirty-minute news magazine segment rather than a ninety-three-minute feature film.
