It was 20 years ago this week that President George W. Bush authorized the illegal, brutal invasion of Iraq. Though the numbers are disputed, that invasion created at least 200,000 violent deaths (and some credible sources say it is 600,000+) for Iraqis and nearly 4500 deaths for US personnel. In addition, there have been more than 9 million Iraqis displaced from home, most of them refugees seeking asylum beyond their own borders. The war has spilled into Syria, contributed to the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey and certainly played a role in Vladimir Putin’s increasing belligerence.
The films of the ‘00s reflect their times much more than the films of the ‘20s have so far. There are dozens of Anglophone international political thrillers of various stripes that were released during the Bush presidency, most replete with spies, conspiracies, arms dealers and moral ambiguity. These are not films with good guys or bad guys—though the CIA and NSA were almost always portrayed as villains— and which also do not parrot a simple “US is Best” sensibility. Such titles include The Bourne Identity, Syriana, State of Play, Burn After Reading and Lord of War, among many others. It was a decade where US-American cinema went out into the world and found a lack of clear answers. The movies reflected the broader feelings about the Bush-Cheney White House and their neo-imperial “Global War on Terror”; tellingly, once a Democrat armed with an idealistic vocabulary ascended to the throne of power in DC, the movies (and the broader world—we are looking at you, Nobel Peace Prize voters!) lost their critical, prophetic voice.
No other film is more emblematic of the evaporation of the ‘00s’ disparaging stance towards US foreign policy post-2008 than Beyond Borders. The very premise of the Martin Campbell-directed piece is that the deep-pocketed urban white elite—the sort who do things like pay for movies, write newspaper columns about politics and vote for Obama—are vacuous windbags more concerned with appearance than substance. Aside from the co-protagonists, Nick Callahan (Clive Owen, who appears in several of these international thrillers) and Sarah Jordan (Angelina Jolie), basically everyone in this film wants the status and personal aggrandizement of seeming to help the less fortunate rather than being sure that they actually are helping anyone. From the perspective of 2023, the film cannot help but appear to be forecasting the rise of a slicker, more refined Bush with a Democrat Party registration to come in and talk of change while merely doubling down on Bush-era ideas and policies.
Beyond Borders is, above all else, a love story, though one enclosed within a political thriller that is scattered across the world. Nick meets Sarah in London in 1984, when he breaks into a fundraiser to try and rattle the sensibilities of the glad-handing bankers and journalists by showing them how hollow their philanthropy really is. Sarah, alone among the gala attendees, is convinced, following Nick to Ethiopia where he is working to relieve the brutal famine that struck that area in the ‘80s. Sarah becomes a human rights activist back in Britain, but is drawn again to Nick’s side in Cambodia 10 years later, where she is struck by the gap between how those comfortable in their London homes and those on the frontlines experience the task of humanitarian relief. She again returns home, this time pregnant with Nick’s child. The film’s climax is set in Russian-occupied Chechnya, where Nick’s White Messiah complex smashes into the reality of a world torn apart by war and violence. Unfortunately, the denouement is much more about the love story than the pitfalls of Liberal humanitarianism.
Of the flurry of international thrillers churned out by the Anglophone world during the Bush presidency, Beyond Borders is certainly neither the best nor the most successful. In fact, it garnered an execrable 14% score on Rotten Tomatoes (its 2.9 Letterboxd rating is more indicative of its absolute mid-ness). Most critics disliked that it was basically just a traditional romance tale that used refugee camps as settings and the victims of famine and war as props. While that is fair criticism of the film—which is really not very good—this is a film that captures the inherent ambiguity of the privileged few who cannot in good conscience enjoy their privileged ease while the oppressed masses suffer. Both Nick and Sarah as well as the Liberal London windbags all tried to help—so did, if you believe their propaganda, the Bush-Cheney White House—and all have come up short. Few other films in the past 20 years have taken on such a difficult topic and that alone makes Beyond Borders worthwhile.
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