The Mark of Cain Marc Munden UK 2007
'Girls were throwing their bras at lads who came back from the Falklands – But we won in the Falklands' . With lines like this nobody's pulling any punches in The Mark of Cain, a Channel Four film about the ongoing Iraq peacekeeping/occupation. It's a hard hitting drama that draws on the media reported cases of prisoner abuse that came to light in the months following the invasion/liberation and spins a tale of soldiers almost forced into committing torture by the pressures of the job and then scape-goated by the army when the incident accidentally goes public. It nicely uses the idea of sand in your hair to convey guilt that just won't go which also mixes with the title. Problem is though, it all seems a little forced at times.
Director Marc Munden does a good job of conveying what it might be like to actually be there, bestowing sympathy on the soldiers who suddenly find themselves the custodians of Iraqi law and order. Faced with a baying mob of Iraqis who want to lynch a suspected petrol thief they reluctantly start to administer corporal punishment and when two of their own are blown up by insurgents it all spirals into much worse behaviour, mimicking the abuses that went public in real life. This is then followed by the immense amount of old boy style arse-covering that goes on back home in Britain to obfuscate the full extent of the army's involvement, limiting fallout to as few undesirable elements as possible. The film follows two soldiers, one of whom played by Gerard Kearns, took part reluctantly who are court-martialled and left out to dry by the army.
The Mark of Cain is a shocking film about a deeply repugnant set of incidents but the film emulates the same divided state many people found themselves in when the UK joined the bid to invade Iraq in the first place. It shows outrageous events, both the torture of prisoners and the subsequent failure of the army to punish all the wrongdoers but although the politics will be sympathetic to any liberals it's a fairly in-your-face protest film that simply isn't as good as, say, The Road to Guantanamo. The reasons for this are that the script over forces some of the characters' actions to get where it wants to go and resorts to a good old fashioned stereotyped view of the British army (balding, posh accented baddies) in the end. That stereotype may or may not be true; some of the characters in The Mark of Cain at times certainly are not. By contrast in The Road to Guantanamo, the characters' decision to go backpacking in Afghanistan may seem stupid but you never doubt that they did it.
Notably an initially sympathetic Sargent in The Mark of Cain ends up showing his true colours at the end by abandoning his former charges to the court martial. Fair enough, people save their own skins, but The Mark of Cain tries to half hide this side of him disastrously undermining any credibility later on. It probably happened just like this in real life but the film doesn't know how to handle this kind of character well enough without introducing the element of doubt. Once that has happened the film is in trouble as you start to wonder what else might be contrived. The other problem character is the girlfriend of one of the accused who makes pictures of the torture public when he cheats on he. Again there's some doubt about a character who has been used for plot ends. This then snowballs into a major problem for a protest film because they tend to bring an issue to a larger audience by projecting some sort of perceived truth. Muck up how this 'truth' is portrayed and the whole thing risks falling apart.
Intriguingly Channel Four have moved the television screening date of The Mark of Cain around quite a bit. This may be due to the problems Celebrity Big Brother caused for the management of the station but it may mean something else. The news images from Abu Ghraib and elsewhere have made their mark in today's mass media also generating a documentary about US abuse called Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. So does regurgitating them yet again in the docu-drama format justify it all? It's done much better in Children of Men where the game is 'spot the media reference'. But despite all the problems with The Mark of Cain there is an issue here that deserves attention.
