"The thing that
gets under my skin most about George W. [Bush] is his intention
to install fear in people […] this government is all about
terror alerts and scaring us at airports. We're changing the
Constitution out of fear. We spend all our time looking up each
other's dresses. Fear's the only issue the Republican Party has.
Vote for them, or the terrorists will win. That's not what
Reagan was about. I hate to think about our soldiers over in
Iraq fighting for a country that's slipping away." –Merle
Haggard, country musician, in an interview with Time
magazine.
Haggard’s line
of thinking in the above quote has achieved a widespread
prominence in today’s American Society. A large portion of
Americans, it seems, have been led to believe that their civil
liberties are constantly being violated in the name of fighting
the “façade” that is a terrorist enemy. The idea that the threat
of the Islamo-Nazism is being “overplayed” by the Bush
Administration is all too commonly held among the citizens of
this country, especially those who carry liberal political
beliefs. Extremists will even tell you that they view Bush—not
bin Laden, not Ahmadinejad, not Chavez—as the world’s most
dangerous terrorist.
With movies
like Rendition being released, it’s no wonder that such a
worrisomely large percentage of the American Population feels
this way. If the Bush Administration should be questioned (or
even impeached, as some suggest) for instilling “fear” in the
American People, then the minds behind this film should be tried
for treason. (Okay – I’m being facetious here, but I want to
exaggerate just how hypocritical their views are.) Rendition
stretches the truth in order to promote a political agenda to an
absolutely ridiculous extent, so falsely impassioned that it
never stops to realize how unbelievably contrived a movie
it becomes in the process.
The film’s
title references a practice developed by the Clinton
Administration and used by the Bush Administration in order to
allow for the forceful interrogation suspected terrorists. An
extreme rendition takes place when the United States
government moves said suspect to another country in order to, as
the movie suggests, torture them in the hope that they will
elicit classified information.
Instead of
functioning as a riveting look at the Bush Administration’s
supposed use of torture (a practice that it unequivocally
denies), Rendition fudges facts to create a narrative
that simply doesn’t hold water. In fact, movie doesn’t say a
whole lot more than “The current U.S. Government is really
big and really bad!”
The suspect
being tortured here is Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), an
innocent Egyptian national (but a 20+ year-resident of the
United States and a graduate of NYU engineering school) who is
taken into U.S. custody and subjected to a rendition by the CIA.
Anwar is assumed to have been involved in the making of a bomb
by an African terrorist organization because of phone calls that
he received from a number once associated with the group’s
leader. Even when the American officer in charge of Anwar’s
torture, Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal), tells Washington
that he is convinced that Anwar is not guilty and that the
telephone calls were made by a second-hand owner of the number
in question, Anwar is not released.
There are two
important facts about the process of an extreme rendition that
director Hood and writer Kelley Sane patently ignore. Firstly,
the reason that renditions are performed in other countries is
so that suspects can be tried for their crimes in their native
land. Hood and Sane pretend as though the U.S. Government
conducts the practice on foreign soil so that it can get away
with torture, which is simply not true. Secondly, the writer and
director suggest that renditions are performed on long-time
residents of the United States when, in fact, the practice is
reserved almost exclusively for suspected terrorists that have
been in the country for limited amounts of time. Renditions are
never conducted on American citizens, and rarely
(if at all) performed on residents of the country that are as
established as Anwar. The film is not based on any specific case
and, as a result, sees no problem in stretching credibility in
order to make its point.
As if the
central storyline of the film involving Anwar wasn’t ridiculous
enough, there is also a hearty abundance of subplots in
Rendition that allow the viewer to further roll their eyes
at the screen. The most prominent among these involves Anwar’s
pregnant (yes, they went there) wife, Isabella (Reese
Witherspoon), who slowly pieces together what the government has
done to her husband. She pursues the high-ranking official in
charge of Anwar’s disappearance, Corrinne Whitman (Meryl Streep),
with the help of an old boyfriend (Peter Sarsgaard) who now
works for a respected senator (Alan Arkin). All the while, the
viewer’s attention also shifts back in time to witness the real
history behind the detonated-bomb that caused Anwar’s
imprisonment. (Of course, these passages come across in such a
muddled way that I barely realized the film’s narrative
structure was not linear, as I had previously assumed, by the
time that all of the pieces of the puzzle fit together.)
There is some
talent behind Rendition, however, that deserves
recognition. Director Hood helmed 2004’s wonderful Tsotsi,
and does assemble the film with a considerable amount of
slickness and skill despite its overall ridiculousness and its
aforementioned confusing plot-structure. In addition, the
members of the cast deliver almost uniformly excellent
performances, even if they are essentially pieces of propaganda.
(The work of Witherspoon, Sarsgaard, and Arkin is especially
memorable.) It’s actually somewhat of a miracle that these
actors come off as authentically as they do given the cartoonish
nature of the work on the whole. It’s a shame that such a
gifted cast and crew were so consumed by their own half-baked
left-wing vision of U.S. Foreign Policy that they decided to
participate in the making of Rendition. Had this been any
other movie, their many talents would’ve been put to better use.
As it is, Rendition is a painfully deluded take on a
crucial time in World History.
-Danny Baldwin,
Bucket Reviews
Review Published
on: 10.28.2007
Screened on:
10.20.2007 at the Krikorian Vista Metroplex 15 in Vista, CA.
Rendition is rated R and runs 122
minutes.
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