review: rendition

I saw Rendition when it came out in theaters in 2007, but I recently re-watched it on DVD and was reminded of just how effing brilliant it is. As I'm rapidly learning that it's the best political movie no one's ever seen, I'm going to go ahead and write a review of it here in the hopes that I will motivate some of you to watch it.

When Roger Ebert called this movie "perfect," he was not exaggerating. Rendition is an exquisitely crafted film that really needs to be seen twice to be fully appreciated. It's one of the most brilliant political films I've ever seen, and carries a deeply radical message seamlessly embedded in a compelling, utterly convincing human drama. In short, it does pretty much everything I want to do as a storyteller.

The title refers to the US policy of extraordinary rendition--a practice that's been around since the Clinton years but got a new lease on life after 9/11--whereby the CIA is allowed to essentially kidnap terrorism suspects, fly them to anywhere in the world and interrogate them without charges or due process. Some of these people end up in Guantanamo. Many more end up in prisons scattered across the globe, in countries that are either occupied by the US or whose governments collaborate with the US in the practice of torture. Although Rendition uses fictional characters, the story is closely based on several real cases, some of which are discussed in the brief but compelling documentary Outlawed, which is included on the DVD of the film.

Rendition tells three stories simultaneously with incredible efficiency. The main story focuses on Anwar el-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), the unfortunate person to be "rendered," an Egyptian national with a green card and a young son and very pregnant wife in the States. Anwar is a "good Arab," an NYU-educated professional with a six-figure salary as a chemical engineer. He even coaches his son's soccer team, for crap's sake! But he happens to get a phone call from a phone that may or may not belong to a terrorist mastermind, and this, plus a hefty dose of racial profiling, is enough to get him whisked off to an unnamed North African country where very bad things will happen to him. In charge of these very bad things is local lieutenant Abasi Fawal, a guy with a grisly job that he firmly believes is saving lives, and "observing" the process is a green CIA officer named Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal, in a great and subtle performance.)

While we're watching Anwar, Freeman and Fawal in North Africa, we're also following Anwar's wife Isabella (Reese Witherspoon) through Washington, DC in her desperate search to find out what happened to her husband. And we're watching two young North African university students, Fatima and Khaled, who are in love despite Fatima's father's disapproval, and whose vital importance to the story does not become clear until almost the end of the film.

You may think this already sounds like a lot of plot, and I haven't even mentioned Meryl Streep, Peter Skarsgaard or Alan Arkin. But this film is an amazingly deft story machine. It wasn't until I re-watched it that I really appreciated the vast amount of information the filmmakers are able to convey in ways that often seem completely effortless. In the first fifteen minutes, we're introduced to eight major characters, all three storylines, three different locations, and the central problem of the story. (For those of us in Script Anaylsis this semester--this film follows the eight-sequence model TO THE MINUTE at times.) The film starts fast and rarely slows down, but we never lose the human drama of what's happening to these people.

The thing that stunned me the most about this film when I first watched it was its incredible realism. We're not watching the Hollywood version of the US intelligence world. We are watching the real thing. Jake Gyllenhaal plays probably the only realistic CIA officer I've ever seen in an American film--not a getaway-car-driving, terrorist-killing, border-hopping James Bond pastiche, but a quiet, tie-wearing poli-sci major who treads carefully through conversations, jokes about wearing a gun he never uses, and is ultimately ill-prepared for the human consequences of policies written by people he only interacts with by cell phone. The interrogation scenes--especially the good cop/bad cop dynamic between Freeman and Fawal--could have been lifted straight out of the pages of truth commission reports from half a dozen countries, or from the pages of the CIA's own interrogation manuals, for that matter. It's not until you see something this chillingly, utterly authentic that you realize just how much fake-spy crap is out there, much of it pretending to be real-spy crap.

The film also provides an incredibly nuanced and authentic portrait of the Muslim world, much of which slides by completely incidental to the plot. The North African women of this film are, by and large, not major characters, but I love the fact that they go to university, have careers, are politically active and seem generally aware of their own capacity for independence. I also love the fact that people in this world behave like rational human beings with actual, understandable motivations, and not as some caricatured western projection of inscrutable Islamist extremism. Again, this is notable because it's the exception in US film, not the rule.

This is just one of the many ways in which Rendition is a deeply, fundamentally radical film. Without giving anything away, I'll mention that partway through the film, we realize that we are watching the development of a suicide bomber. By the time we understand this fact, this person's storyline has been building so naturally, inexorably and organically to this point that we not only understand his motivations but actually sympathize with him. His action becomes as much a tragedy for him as for everyone else it affects.

This film demonstrates a remarkable ability to present, without caricature, many sides of a complex moral issue, while still taking a definitive stand about right and wrong. It contains a good deal of violence, some of which is hard to watch--as it should be. It makes very powerful arguments about torture and terrorism without ever managing to sound preachy or fake. When Freeman utters the central moral thesis of the film--"if you torture one person, you create ten, a hundred, a thousand new enemies"--you feel like he's saying it because he's really been thinking about it, not because the screenwriter wanted to put it in there. And in fact, all the lines of action support this thesis beautifully, and the film is smart enough to know it doesn't have to hammer the point home.

One of the interesting things about this film is where it locates power and choice. Anwar and Isabella, the ostensible protagonists of the story, are acutely helpless throughout most of the action. (Omar Metwally, in particular, has a thankless job in this film and handles it magnificently.) Anwar has very little power; Isabella even less. The people who really drive the action of this film are the perpetrators--a torturer and a terrorist. The person who has the most important choice to make is Freeman, the footsoldier of US imperialism. In this film--as in reality--foreign policy may be crafted in the clean, sleek, monochromatic corridors of Washington, DC, but it is carried out in the messy, gritty, bloody theaters of the third world, and it's there that its consequences must be faced.

The DVD of Rendition includes an excellent little making-of documentary that's really a valuable insight into the film. Jake Gyllenhaal and director Gavin Hood both mention that this is a film about being alone in the world. That may seem like a bleak message, but I think, in the context of the film, what it means is that sometimes there's no one to hold us accountable for our actions but ourselves. "Once you throw out the rule book and say, hey, there are no rules; it's a dirty war," Gavin Hood says, "well, then, it's a dirty war." He should know, too, as a South African who grew up under apartheid. In such a world, we all have to make our own choices about our actions and be prepared to live with the consequences.