The largest and most expensive trial in U.S. Marine Corps history began as the result of an event in November 2005, wherein an IED blast hit a patrol in the western Iraq town of Haditha, killing one Marine. The initial story from the military was that the bomb had also killed 15 civilians. But the people brought into nearby hospitals didn’t have bomb blast injuries, but gunshot wounds. The gap between the official story and the massacre that happened, and the protracted attempt to bring the two together, is told in Michael Epstein’s studious and frustrating documentary, “House Two,” having its world premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.
Epstein (“The Battle Over Citizen Kane“) starts with a broad overview of the event itself. This is primarily told via Tim McGirk, who broke the story the following spring in Time, and a grisly series of videos which show the aftermath of one of the homes assaulted by the Marines. The images are as horrifying as anything that came out of that war, showing not only a particular savagery (the corpses of women and children, still wearing their nightclothes, heaped on a bed) but a possible attempt to cover it up (long smears of blood on the floor suggesting dragged bodies).
The movie shows that once the story broke, the military quickly realized that the more likely story was not a bomb that killed 15 Iraqis, but that a squad of Marines, enraged after losing one of their own, lashed out at the first Iraqis they came across, murdering 24. At that point, “House Two” shifts into an evidence-gathering mode. The Marines being part of the Navy, an NCIS team was dispatched to Iraq; two of its investigators help establish the parameters of the crime scene for Epstein and the proof they amassed showing that a war crime could have occurred. In December 2016, four Marines were charged with murder.
One of them, Sgt. Frank Wuterich, facing 18 counts of murder, is followed by Epstein as he waits for the trial. Wuterich staunchly insists on his innocence (I’m not a cold-blooded killer”) and won’t admit to any feelings of remorse about the civilians that were killed (“I refuse to torture myself”). Wuterich’s blasé response to the impending trial, not to mention the collapse of his family, doesn’t read any more convincingly than his insistence to his defense attorneys that he simply doesn’t remember most of what happened once he entered the house.
At some point, “House Two” moves from a story of a possible war crime into a densely layered trial narrative. It isn’t an entirely successful move. While being able to follow the buildup to the trial from both the investigators and the defense side is fascinating, it also turns the movie too quickly into something of a sealed true-crime capsule.
Epstein has a point of view in “House Two.” This is ultimately no simple procedural. The movie opens pointedly with footage of President George W. Bush at a forum in Philadelphia answering a question about the number of Iraqi civilian dead. “I would say 30,000.” This was just weeks after the Haditha massacre, and it may have been the first public mention of Iraqi civilian deaths by the U.S. government.
But while the movie tells a harrowing story with skill and drama, it doesn’t do a satisfying job of linking that drama in the American courthouse back to the broader tragedy of the charnel house that was the Iraq War and the strategies that created it. Given what ultimately happened in the trial though, forming such a link may not have been possible. The frustrations over “House Two,” a mostly smart piece of investigatory drama, are due mostly to the events it is tracking, not the movie itself. [B]
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