Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
10/25/07
These
are dangerous times: opportunistic politicians use the Global threat
of terrorism as an excuse to attack our basic human rights. And opportunistic
screenwriters use those attacks as an excuse to trot out tired melodramatic
cliches in the name of proving that We're All Connected. Last year's
Foreign Press darling Babel is the most famous
example of this Soap Opera of Connection genre, but it ultimately had little
to say other than that people who speak in subtitles are worthy of the
same respect as Really Big Stars like Brad Pitt. Now, along comes
the Babelesque Rendition, which has a ton to say about terrorism,
the Middle East, and a US Government-sanctioned torture program called
Extraordinary Rendition. Alas, it says it so softly, so hopelessly
reverent of its' own importance, that even the converted may grow bored
during the sermon.
Several
stories are told at once. Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a
low-ranking government official assigned to an unnamed Middle Eastern country
when the car he's traveling in goes through a square targeted by a suicide
bomber. Douglas is OK, but his superior is killed and a battlefield
promotion puts him in charge. Elsewhere, Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar
Metwally) is a respected, Egyptian-born engineer returning from a conference
in South Africa when he's grabbed by masked goons in an airport and deleted
from the passenger list. His American wife Isabella (Reese Witherspoon)
gets no answers when inquiring after his disappearance. In fact,
Anwar is now in the clutches of the US government on the orders of power
broker Corrine Whitman (Meryl Streep). There's thin reason to suspect
he may have received a call from someone involved in the bombing, and enraged
government interrogators show no interest in his truthful answers, harmless
background or clean lie detector test. To get “the truth”, he's shipped
off to that unnamed country to have it tortured out of him by pro Abasi
Fawal (Yigal Naor) while Douglas “observes”. Abasi has trouble at
home: he hasn't heard from his daughter Fatima (Zineb Oukach) in
a week. She's supposed to be staying with a relative while pouting
about the arranged marriage he's set up for her, but in fact she's sneaking
out to see a boy who's spending way too much time listening to what US
news reports like to call Radical Clerics. Back to the A Story:
the very-pregnant Isabella is lucky enough to have once dated Alan Smith
(Peter Sarsgaard), who's part of the staff of powerful Senator Hawkins
(Alan Arkin). Alan begins to investigate and is troubled by what
he finds, but not nearly as troubled as Douglas is to watch the daily torture
sessions, particularly since Abasi proves to be a consummate professional
who'd clearly torture Anwar every day until retirement without concern.
Can Anwar be saved? Will the stress of the ordeal affect Isabella's
unborn child? Will Fatima be forced to accept an arranged marriage
rather than end up with her true love the Terrorist? What sneaky
narrative trick will put a new spin on everything we've just seen; and
by the time it comes, will anyone still care?
I agree
with pretty much every last thing Rendition has to say about the
politics of torture. One of the things it does best is demonstrate
how removing court oversight from any interrogation process is too much
like making the victims of a crime the jury when someone is tried for it.
The government IS the victim in terrorist attacks, and the natural rage
its' members feel to be victimized is sure to blind them to the possible
innocence of anyone they suspect. The movie's best scene is a spirited
debate on the subject between Streep and Sarsgaard. It has what most
of the rest lacks: a pulse.
It's
amazing how dull a cast of Academy Award winners in a film full of moral
outrages can manage to be, but there you have it: Rendition is
so low-energy that I was never once angry about any of what I was seeing
on-screen, any more than the characters themselves seem to be. Oh,
Streep is her usual excellent self, and crackles with self-important indignation
as she demands that others suffer at her slightest whim. Metwally
suffers admirably, although I was continuously frustrated that I remembered
more important information about the calls Anwar was getting than he ever
did no matter how desperately he needed to summon it. And Naor nails
the clock-punching professionalism of Abasi so well I felt sorry for him
having to play the scenes that involved his daughter. Sarsgaard does
his usual good job balancing goodness and expediency and Arkin makes a
good movie Senator (frankly, he seemed neither stupid nor crooked enough
to approximate a real one). But the Money Roles belong to Witherspoon
and Gyllenhaal, and neither actor gets the job done. It's a huge
mistake to make Isabella so God-awful pregnant: it requires the character
we need to see the most emotion from to be forever soft-spoken and put-upon,
and even within those confines, Witherspoon's performance has an odd quality
of seeming as though her character has already read the script, and none
of its' injustices seems to surprise her. Meanwhile, Gyllenhaal seems
simply miscast. Douglas is in over his head, but required both through
his own near-death trauma and his new job description to remain silent
while what he's witnessing slowly eats him alive. It's the kind of
role that a young James Spader or Robert Downey Jr. would have owned, and
Casey Affleck is doing an excellent job at right now in Gone, Baby,
Gone. But Gyllenhaal specializes in extroversion, and can't make
Douglas seem more than just sad and frumpy.
Director
Gavin Hood (who picked up a Foreign Language Film Oscar for Tsotsi),
stages all this with the quiet seriousness of a movie that's got to really
concentrate to make sure it saves the world the way it's supposed to.
The screenplay by Kelley Sane (assumed name?) has better scenes and dialog
(particularly in the Douglas/Abasi/Anwar scenes) than it seems given the
way it's staged, and that surprise bit of writing slight-of-hand I alluded
to is thematically strong. However, the Fatima subplot is utter melodramatic
piffle: we're certainly never going to learn to understand our neighbors
in the Middle East if their lives, like these characters, consist of nothing
but fleeing arranged marriages and getting recruited by terrorist groups.
And I can't believe how shamelessly the script plays the “potential miscarriage”
card.
I really
wanted to like Rendition. The issues it struggles to discuss
are important, and the potential for drama in the outrages our government
perpetrates in the name of the War on Terror is seemingly endless (see
Jim Sheridan's 1993 IRA injustice drama In the Name of the Father to
learn how it's done). But Rendition is limp, unpersuasive
and cliched, failing to develop relateable human characters or give them
anything interesting to say. We ARE all connected, but by humanity,
not by contrivance. I expect my Message Movies to work a little harder. |
