‘Rendition’ a Mediocre Message Movie With What Should Be Self-Evident Politics

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HollywoodChicago.com Oscarman rating: 3/5AUSTIN, Texas – German writer Franz Kafka meets the war on terror in “Rendition,” which is a message movie with what one would consider a self-evident message: torture is bad. We live in a political climate, though, where that isn’t self-evident.

Reese Witherspoon and Peter Sarsgaard in Rendition
Reese Witherspoon and Peter Sarsgaard in “Rendition”.
Photo courtesy of IMDb

While “Rendition” is timely and invigoratingly noble, it doesn’t really have any perspective. It’s to torture what “Amistad” was to slavery. It’s a $30 million AP brief.

Directed by Gavin Hood (“Tsotsi”), the movie assumes a “Babel”-like structure of tangling Hollywood stars with relative unknowns in intermingling storylines. The inciting story involves an Egyptian expatriate – Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally) – who is detained while coming home to Chicago to his pregnant wife, Isabella (Reese Witherspoon).

Unlike Josef K. (a character in Kafka’s novel “The Trial”), he is told his charges: a phone call he received in the opening scene was from a terrorist who was involved in a suicide bombing. This explosion was meant to kill Abasi Fawal (Yigal Naor) who interrogates at a secret detention prison.

Surviving the explosion was Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal). He’s a new CIA man who must now oversee Fawal as he tortures Anwar.

 Meryl Streep in Rendition
Meryl Streep in “Rendition”.
Photo courtesy of IMDb

Like Josef K., there’s the ambiguous possibility that Anwar might have in fact designed the bomb. While Isabella lobbies her old boyfriend (Peter Sarsgaard) – now an aide to a senator (Alan Arkin) who literally has a copy of the Bill of Rights framed behind his desk – Anwar’s release is continually denied by Corrine Whitman (Meryl Streep).

Streep is given the film’s most thankless job in playing Whitman, whose specific government position is never mentioned but is apparently omnipotent and without oversight. Her character and the movie’s screenplay don’t have the energy to call the Geneva Convention antiquated (as some pundits have).

With her mild Southern accent, she touts “7,000 people alive in central London tonight” including her granddaughter because of rendition-gathered intelligence. Steep plays Whitman as someone who lives and breathes Dick Cheney’s “One Percent Doctrine”.

Written by Kelley Sane, the script was on a 2005 black list of Hollywood’s best never-produced screenplays. It isn’t bad.

Omar Metwally (center) in Rendition
Omar Metwally (center) in “Rendition”.
Photo courtesy of IMDb

Its only dramatic mistake is a sore-thumb subplot involving Fawal’s daughter (Zineb Oukach) shacking up with an Islamic fundamentalist (Moa Khouas). What seems comparatively insignificant for too much screen time builds too late into flashy, “Watchmen”-like narrative gymnastics.

The writing isn’t into the prospect of defending some supposed necessity for extraordinary rendition or torture, which is understandable – after all – because it’s torture. Though laws changed in 2006, the Bush Administration briefly defined the act as anything less painful than organ failure.

While I might be mistaken, I’m not really sure Bush’s name is mentioned in the movie. Clinton’s name is evoked in the spirit of bipartisanship as the first instigator of extreme rendition.

By badly trying to present “both sides,” “Rendition” becomes ashamed of its righteousness. Gyllenhaal and Witherspoon are each given one yelling scene Arkin’s Sen. Hawkins and Sarsgaard’s Alan Smith represent the average citizen’s complacency even as they morally stick with a sinking-ship status quo.

Reese Witherspoon in Rendition
Reese Witherspoon in “Rendition”.
Photo courtesy of IMDb

The movie mistakes passivity for objectivity and defeated characters for nuance. This makes for some tepid drama. “Rendition” certainly can’t address the entertainment industry’s glorification and obfuscation of torture.

As polemic, I can’t deny that “Rendition” really does work. At my screening, the largest cheers came when Smith tells Whitman: “Maybe I should send you a copy of the Constitution.” Regardless of its own ambivalence, the movie is ultimately on the side of the angels.

The reason torture suddenly came back to the bargaining table in the national dialogue isn’t just because of Sept. 11 and fear.

It’s because of people’s lack of imagination to other people’s pain thresholds. If it has to be a $30 million AP dispatch to illustrate that ignorance can deprive anyone of their most inalienable rights, that’s certainly brave.

By Shane Hazen
Staff Writer
HollywoodChicago.com

© 2007 Shane Hazen, HollywoodChicago.com

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