“In Country”

With the rousing success of the final episodes of a certain recent HBO true-crime series, it has become something of a topic du jour to debate the utility of documentary reenactments. Are they meant to be taken as a representation of reality, or of a shady netherworld of could-have-beens? Is there a difference between a what-if scenario and an as-if reimagining? Is the purpose to be illustrative of witness testimony, or a means to work through the vagaries of memory? These are thorny issues without cut-and-dried answers. Really, the only certainty is how prescriptive and limiting it is to believe that there can be only one right way to incorporate reenactments into a documentary. And though In Country is a documentary about the act of reenactment itself, the questions it raises are just as pertinent.

Mike Attie and Meghan O’Hara’s film follows the Delta 2/5(R), a group of Vietnam War reenactors based in Oregon. Among their ranks are veterans of contemporary conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, local civilians yearning to have a military experience without the threat of real-life combat, and actual veterans of Vietnam—including a former soldier of the South Vietnamese Army. Combining a band-of-brothers combat narrative with embedded journalism—the men stay “in character” for the duration of their war-game weekends, even when speaking to the filmmakers—In Country is a compelling look at the cathartic and empathetic functions of reenacting socio-political trauma.

For decades, the collective memory of Vietnam has been an open wound in the history of United States foreign politics. Unlike most romanticized and elegantly costumed Civil War reenactments, the act of re-imagining—or, for some of the men, reliving—combat scenarios in an ersatz Vietnam is more emotionally complex than mere jingoistic playacting. Though the impetus behind the group’s activities are valiant, Attie and O’Hara smartly don’t shy away from the complicated motivations of its individual members. An Iraqi war veteran nicknamed “Tuna,” for example, confesses his difficulties reintegrating into his civilian family life, and sees the Delta 2/5(R) as an opportunity to return to the disciplined lifestyle to which he had grown accustomed in the army. And there is “Bummy,” a Vietnam vet who came home feeling ashamed of his time overseas, for whom the reenactments have become a part of his healing process.

Beyond exploring the value of reenacting this particular unwinnable war, In Country more broadly explores the value of capturing reenactments on film. For Errol Morris, who famously staged and restaged witness testimony in The Thin Blue Line, reenactments served to examine the slipperiness of memory and perception, while for Andrew Jarecki in the previously referenced The Jinx, it was more a means to imbue past events with immediacy and dramatic tension. Both of these driving engines are behind the reenactors’ activities in Attie and O’Hara’s film: not simply a reliving of painful memories but a reexamination of the past within the present context. It is an attempt to understand what might have been going through the minds of the young men who were called to serve their country in an untenable situation. In that way, In Country is as much an unabashedly humanist document as it is a fascinating and touching piece of nonfiction filmmaking.