In a sentenceThree lads from Manchester liberate a city and then cannot stop going back to it
Basra, 2003. Three soldiers from Manchester, Mike Swift (James Nesbitt), Danny Ferguson (Stephen Graham) and Lee Hibbs (Warren Brown), are part of the British force holding the city in the weeks after the invasion. A raid goes wrong, a child is hurt, and Mike carries her to a hospital where she is treated by an Iraqi doctor, Aliya Nabil (Lubna Azabal). The pictures make him a hero at home, which his wife Nicky (Monica Dolan) finds harder to live with than he expects. Back in Manchester, none of the three settle. Danny is courted by Erik Lester (Nonso Anozie), a man they knew in Basra who now hires for private security and pays in cash. Lee cannot sleep. Mike finds a reason to go back that has less to do with the child than with her doctor.
Peter Bowker’s three-part drama follows three British soldiers home from Basra and back again, a war story more interested in the years after than the tour. The first hour is cut too hard and the structure is tidy, but the acting carries it.
Most war dramas end when the plane lands. Occupation, written by Peter Bowker and directed by Nick Murphy, first shown in June 2009, starts there. Three soldiers from Manchester go to Basra in 2003, come home, and find that home no longer fits, and the three hours that follow are about what each of them does with that. It is good, and good for a plain reason: it stays with the men long after the fighting is over, and it does not let any of them off.
The set-up is a raid. Murphy stages it in daylight dust, with nobody quite sure which building they are meant to be in, and David Odd shoots Basra in a yellow glare so hard that the shadows go black. A child is hurt and Mike Swift (James Nesbitt) carries her down a hospital corridor while a camera crew follows. We will admit it worked on us exactly as it works on the news cameras in the story. Then, within the same hour, we are in a kitchen in Manchester watching Nicky Swift (Monica Dolan) see the same footage, and her face is not pride, and we understood we had been had, and that this was the point.
Odd lights Manchester the opposite way, low grey daylight and lamps on at noon, so the men look washed out at home and burnt in Iraq. Ashleigh Jeffers’s production design keeps the Basra compounds to breeze block, sandbags and one working kettle, and Maggie Donnelly’s costumes track the drift from fatigues to the polo shirts and wraparound sunglasses of the private firms. Daniel Pemberton’s score is a low pulse under the Iraq scenes and goes almost silent in England, which is the right way round. The men are quieter at home. It is the quiet that is the trouble.
The acting is what most critics have praised, and they are right. Nesbitt plays Mike as a decent man who has found a reason to lie and is slightly pleased with himself for it; the romance with Aliya Nabil (Lubna Azabal) is the least surprising of the three strands, and Azabal, tired and clever and never grateful, keeps it from being foolish. Stephen Graham’s Danny talks fast and laughs a beat early, and Nonso Anozie’s Erik Lester, who offers him money to go back, is all patience and no warmth. Warren Brown has the hardest job as Lee, the one who says least, and the scene of him sitting on his bed at home with his kit still packed is the one we have thought about most.
It is not easy going at the start. Victoria Boydell cuts the first episode hard, trimming scenes to the bone and jumping between the three men so quickly that we lost lines under the accents and the gunfire, and we suspect some viewers gave up before it settled. It does settle. By the second hour the cutting slows to the pace of the men’s lives, and the series is better for it.
The flaw is in the plan. Three soldiers, three stories: the one who goes back for love, the one who goes back for money, the one who goes back because he believes in the job. It is as tidy as a diagram, and because three hours have to cover years, the later episodes move in jumps, with a caption and a new haircut standing in for the time between. Danny’s strand with Lester goes roughly where you expect, and we will say nothing about where Mike’s goes except that Bowker does not flinch. Lee’s is the one that surprised us, and the one we would show to anyone who thinks they know what a drama about Iraq will say.
It is a 15, and it earns it, more for what the men do to each other than for the shooting. Watch all three in one evening if you can. The gaps between episodes are where these men lose their way, and you should not give them one.
Banks-Smith finds Occupation tough going but ultimately wonderful. She particularly praises the acting, while noting the clattering accents and whiplash cutting as early obstacles.
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The Mark of CainBritish squaddies in Basra, and what the photographs they took cost them afterwards.
Generation Kill · not reviewed yetThe American invasion from inside a Humvee, bored and frightened in equal measure.
Three KingsThe first Gulf War as a gold heist, angrier than its jokes let on.
Waltz with BashirAn Israeli veteran animates what he cannot remember of Lebanon, 1982.
KajakiOne minefield in Helmand, one afternoon, and almost no music.
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