Homeland or The Land of Nuances

A Sort-of Movie Review I've recently started watching TV series Homeland, and I find myself constantly blown away by the various themes and questions it raises, covering the drawbacks of the most glorious American civilization. The story is about a CIA agent who suspects a just recently returned prisoner of war and momentary hero has been turned against his country. Will she be right? Could he really work for the terrorists who tortured him against the country he had sworn to protect but which let him rot for eight years in his cell?

Among the obviously exciting plot twists, the series has an even greater vantage from my point of view: the virtue of showing the nuances of certain said to be black-and-white problems which ruin so many good war movies and spy thrillers, making them less than credible. Right from the first episode it shows the moral ambiguity of surveillance, the difficulty of coming home to a loving family, the impossibility to integrate and communicate with a community which knows nothing of the horrors of war.

And then there are the characters. Masterfully portrayed by their respective actors, the protagonists are full of flaws and brilliance. Carry is the driven and ambitious intelligence officer whose life dismisses the working class myth that you can be successful at your work and still have a personal life. She is a valuable asset to the agency, yet she doesn't have time or space for anything else. Brody's character is even more complex: it shatters the image of the brave yet jolly hero, who sacrifices his life in a just war and comes home to tell stories about it at dinner. He doesn't tell stories (or if he does they are either fictional or deeply unsettling), he can hardly cope with the stress of coming home, and there is no just war. There is war where soldiers kill each other, where bombers blow up children, where suicide bombers blow up officials who send off soldiers to die, or where people who like each other do everything in their power to sabotage their mission, where people understand none of their friends as well as they do their enemies, and so on.

This movie systematically brakes down all what we thought we knew about right and wrong, good and evil, and the functional yet highly arbitrary legal and social system of the world's greatest country. And that's what I like about it. It compels us to think for ourselves, to try to find the truth from out there. What is the truth? The truth is that there is no truth, only sides, opinions and ways of looking at them. There is no black and white, only a thousand shades of grey, one closer to light, the other one closer to darkness.