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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.

reading versus watching

I have one professor who's obsessed with reading screenplays and basically told us on the first day of class that as screenwriters, watching finished films is useless to us. I have another professor who told us on the first day of *his* class (in which we watch a movie every week, then watch it a second time and analyze it) that watching finished films was the best way to learn storytelling and we weren't going to get very much from reading scripts.

Prof #1 (the reading guy) makes a very valid point: you're writing a script, not a movie. No one is going to buy the imaginary movie that you create in your head as you're writing your screenplay; they are going to buy your script. And if you want the imaginary movie in your head to ever have a chance of becoming a real movie, you'd better write a damn good script. Which you can learn to do by reading other scripts and seeing how they work or don't work.

Prof #2 (the watching guy) argues that watching a film is primarily an emotional experience, and that we should be striving to get our scripts as close to the emotional journey of watching a finished movie as possible. He also points out, quite rightly, that "editing is the final rewrite" and that we can learn more about story structure from looking at a finished project that works well than from a script, even a great script, because things often change in shooting, and if the movie is good they should get better.

So who is right? Well, of course, they both have valid points. But after reading a bunch of scripts and watching a bunch of movies, and arguing vociferously with Prof #1 about this question, I have to say that I still lean toward the "watching is better" side of the debate. Of course I think you can learn a lot from reading scripts, and it would be ridiculous to try to be a screenwriter without ever having read a script.

I think reading scripts is entirely valuable for the technical, "how did they write this kind of scene?" knowledge. Certainly, if I was going to write, for example, a big action movie, I would read a bunch of those types of scripts to see how others have done it. What does that huge long chase scene at the beginning of Casino Royale look like on the page? That is certainly essential to know. But I think you can learn just as much about dramatic structure and audience engagement from watching a finished film--perhaps more, since a finished movie has been through the hands of actors, a director, a cinematographer and an editor, who, if they're competent, should know as much about cinematic storytelling as the screenwriter.

There's another argument in favor of watching, in my opinion. We're in the business of moving pictures. Movies may start on the page, but they're meant to be experienced visually--in the theater, on the big screen. Many people have written about how the human activity that's closest to watching a movie is dreaming. We go into a dark room, we stare at a bunch of still pictures, and our brain creates an experience out of them for us. David Howard and Frank Daniel, the intellectual patriarchs of the USC screenwriting program, write about how a movie should be experienced like a "seamless dream." (This is, by the way, in the introduction to a fairly technical book on screenwriting structure.)

I was in New York City for about three days over winter break, and during that time I saw four movies and two plays. And the whole time I was sitting in the audience, I was thinking THIS IS AWESOME. I remembered why I love movies and why I wanted to create them in the first place. I'd forgotten the magic of sitting in a dark room filled with other people and experiencing something beautiful together. Ultimately, film is designed to be experienced visually, emotionally and collectively. Even the best script in the world can't replicate the experience of sitting in the dark and watching a great movie with other people. And I definitely think you can't write a great movie without remembering this experience.

P.S. In the interest of full disclosure, the "watching guy" is my feature writing prof from last semester, and his class basically rocked my world. It's not hyperbole to say that his class fundamentally transformed my writing process in ways that I'm still only beginning to understand. The "reading guy" is my feature writing teacher this semester, and let's just say he has a very different approach. He and I have not gotten along so well this semester--I think we just have very different creative approaches. So perhaps I am a bit biased on this question. But of course, I still think I'm right.

a worthy cause

Al-Awda, the Palestinian Right of Return Coalition, is actively seeking donations to support the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, whose headquarters in Gaza City were badly damaged in Israel's most recent assault on Gaza.

The GCMHP provides an invaluable service to Gazans living under occupation. While many international humanitarian groups, such as Doctors Without Borders and the ICRC, have been working bravely in Gaza for many years to provide physical health services, there are very few resources to deal with the mental health of a population living under the constant threat of siege, economic blockade, air strikes, home demolitions, poverty, arrest, detention, and torture.

The GCMHP provides counseling and other mental health services, with a special emphasis on children (half the population of Gaza is under 16), women, and torture survivors. Their work is not just a critical social service--it is in itself a nonviolent form of resistance to occupation.

Donations to help the GCMHP rebuild their headquarters can be made online through the Al-Awda website.

review: waltz with bashir

I saw Waltz with Bashir on January 11, and have been trying to review it ever since. There is so much to say about this movie, and yet the only advice I can give is to see it for yourself--for crap's sake, on the big screen. If there's any movie to be experienced like a "seamless dream," to use a popular phrase here at USC, it's this one.

Waltz with Bashir is a movie about war, trauma, guilt, and most particularly about memory and its distortion under the impact of these forces. It is a rather traditional talking-head documentary transformed into a hallucinatory acid-flashback masterpiece through the inspired use of animation. It is at once a compelling statement on the universal horrors of modern warfare, and a specific and searing investigation of one particular war, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, in which the filmmaker Ari Folman fought at the tender age of 19.

The film starts with a vivid post-traumatic dream described by one of Folman's old war buddies--a dream attached to a snippet of a war story with its own waking-nightmare creepiness. In response, Folman realizes, seemingly suddenly, that he can remember nothing of his own experiences in Lebanon. But that night he has a flashback: three soldiers, himself included, emerging naked out of the sea outside Beirut, the night sky illuminated by the eerie orange glow of slowly falling flares.

The flashback, as it turns out, is not a real memory at all, but a kind of cipher from Folman's subconscious, which sends him on a quest to interview other old friends and comrades, hoping their memories will help unearth his. As they talk, Folman animates their war stories--some surreal and perhaps even fantastical, others etched with brutal verite detail--including some events in which he was a participant but cannot remember at all.

At the rotten center of his investigation is the question of the Israeli army's involvement in one of the most ghastly chapters of a long and brutal civil war: the massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in September 1982. The killing was done by the Phalangists, a far-right Lebanese Christian militia (named after the group that brought fascism to Spain), but the Israeli army encircled and guarded the camps, and illuminated the night sky with bright orange rocket flares for three days while somewhere between 700 and 3,500 men, women and children were killed. An accurate figure will probably never be known, partially because large numbers of women and children were brought out of the camps in trucks and never seen again.

At one point, Folman describes how Israeli troops were stationed in concentric rings around the camps while the massacre was taking place. And the film operates much like this: circling closer and closer to the horror at its center, forcing us to see a little more with each step closer we get. It begins with dreams and hallucinations, but the closer we get to the truth inside Folman's head, the more realistic the images become--until the end of the film, when we are left staring straight into the brutal, naked reality of the things he tried so hard to forget.

The very end of the film features an artistic choice which is quite jarring and about which critics seem to disagree. I won't spoil it here, but will merely say that I think it's inspired and completely in keeping with the aesthetic, political and personal trajectory of the film. It features images that I had never seen, despite having been familiar with these events for years, and after the film I found myself asking why.

This film made me think a lot about how specific images of war are ingrained in the collective consciousness of nations. I am sure Americans will look at this film and see the Vietnam War: a confusing, chaotic and ill-defined conflict, in which young soldiers resort to massive firepower against an unseen guerrilla enemy and unspeakable atrocities are never very far away. Several reviews have already compared the film to Apocalypse Now. Many of the war stories told by Folman's friends have a surreal, dreamlike quality that reminded me strongly of The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien's haunting Vietnam War memoir.

But Israelis in the 1980s looked at the war and saw something else. Just one generation removed from the Holocaust (Folman's parents survived Auschwitz), their collective memory was still raw with images of a different war. When Folman looked at Palestinian refugee camps, he couldn't help seeing "the other camps," as his friend subtly remarks. A Palestinian boy with his hands in the air reminds him of the iconic image from the clearing of the Warsaw ghetto that anyone who's seen Schindler's List or read a high school history textbook can probably recall.

There is a difference, of course, in the scale of the atrocities--but not in the sharpness of the guilt. The questions Folman begins to ask himself as the film progresses are an eerie echo of the questions asked by post-Holocaust generation in Germany to their parents. Where were you? What were you doing? Did you know what was happening, and if you could have done something to stop it, why didn't you?

The film is pretty unequivocal about the assertion that the Israeli army knew a massacre was taking place. "Didn't you think about the fact that the trucks kept going out full and coming back empty?" Folman asks one eyewitness. A reporter present at the time recalls how he called Ariel Sharon, then the Defense Minister, who seemed unconcerned about the matter. (An Israeli commission established to investigate the massacre found Sharon "personally responsible" for not trying to stop it...although this did not prevent him from being elected Prime Minister in 2001.)

About his own role, Folman is a bit more vague. He thinks he was in the second or third ring out from the camps, but we never get a definitive answer, nor do we leave the film being really certain of what he does or doesn't remember. Perhaps this is because he himself is not certain. "Did you fire the flares?" a friend asks. Folman doesn't answer, and (unless I missed it) the accompanying image is unclear. Does he not remember, or not want to remember?

Whatever the answer is, the mere act of being near the camps was enough to make him feel like a Nazi, a shame that sealed his memory closed for nearly 30 years. It was this same shame, I would imagine, that led 400,000 Israelis--ten percent of the population--to protest Israel's involvement in the massacre in Tel Aviv in 1982. For a nation whose population has been almost universally supportive of every war waged in the country's short but bellicose history, such an explosion of outrage was shocking. But the hypocrisy was just too stunning to ignore.

Today, as Gaza is pounded into submission, the silence inside Israel is deafening. Certainly, the situations are not completely analogous. One event was a deliberate and calculated massacre of non-combatants, carried out with the sadistic horror-movie fury that only fascism can unleash. The other is merely a casual slaughter of civilians who happen to be trapped in a huge open-air prison with a small number of fighters that Israel may or may not particularly care about killing, so long as they are punished for existing. (Actually, when you put it that way, the differences seem pretty slim, don't they?)

But I can't help wondering, as generations grow up and the nightmare events that are supposedly the justification for Israel's existence in the first place recede further and further into the past, if people are starting to forget. Not forget in the historical sense--there are museums and foundations aplenty to make sure that never happens--but in the instinctive, human sense, the sense that sees another person oppressed, suffering, and thinks "That could be me."

I suppose the mere existence of this film shows that such sentiment cannot be totally dead. There is some instinct that compels us to seek out and understand the truth, even when reality is so painful that we can only bear to look at it through the lens of art.

oscar noms: ur doin it right!

The Oscar nominations were announced yesterday, and I must say I was pleasantly surprised. Not only have some excellent high-profile films been rewarded, but a few lesser-known indie gems got a well-deserved nod.

I was happy to see that Milk scored Best Picture, Director and Original Screenplay nods, along with well-deserved nominations for Sean Penn as Best Actor and Josh Brolin in the Heath Ledger...er, Best Supporting Actor category. More surprising were the Best Screenplay and Best Actress (Melissa Leo) nods for the highly-regarded Frozen River, from first-time writer/director Courtney Hunt.

And while the Best Actor category was filled with the predictable slate of Penn, Frank Langella, Mickey Rourke and Brad Pitt, my heart leapt a bit to see Richard Jenkins up there for The Visitor--a simply fantastic movie in which Jenkins is adorable, moving and perfectly cast.

I was also pleased to see Man on Wire, which is great, in the Best Documentary category, and Waltz with Bashir, which is a masterpiece, in Best Foreign Film. (It recently won the category at the Golden Globes.) There was even a Best Screenplay nod for the underrated In Bruges!

All in all, it's shaping up to be an awards season in which I will actually give a shit.

obama and the real america

I know, this blog has been all doom and gloom lately, all Gaza and torture. And I have been hatin' on Obama a bit. (Still mad about the Rick Warren thing, btw.) But today is Inauguration Day, and even those of us who have low expectations for the amount of change to come are sure as hell happy to see Bush go.

It's only been eight years, but I think you'll agree that it feels like a lot longer. The year 2000 seems incredibly far away now. Back then, I was a freshman at Columbia University, one of our new president's alma maters. Ralph Nader's 2000 election campaign (along with the Second Intifada in Palestine, which started three weeks into my first semester) was in many ways my introduction to politics. I've never been an activist without Bush in office. It's a bit weird.

Thinking back to that time, a few memories jump out. Certainly, the Nader "super rally" that filled Madison Square Garden is one of them. We were all the way in the nosebleed seats since we'd been tabling outside until the last possible minute, and to this day I can't remember what Nader actually said. But I remember that Ani DiFranco played "Fuel" and Eddie Vedder sang "The Times, They Are A-Changin'," and it felt like maybe they really were.

I remember, quite distinctly, holding a sign at a small, silent vigil for Palestine on the Sundial (where all protests take place at Columbia) while a Zionist student spat at us while he passed. He didn't quite have the balls to spit *on* us, but we got the message. I was seething with rage because I wanted to yell at him, but I couldn't since it was a silent vigil. I decided silent vigils were stupid.

I also remember the first week of the spring semester, in which we filled five buses in five days to go protest Bush's inauguration.

It's strange to see so many people pouring into DC again, but filled with hope instead of anger. Two million people, many estimate, plus untold numbers watching around the country. I was in Washington for the March for Women's Lives, when the crowd was somewhere around a million, and this crowd definitely looks bigger to me.

To me, President Obama is far more interesting for who he is than for his actual politics. All cynicism aside, anyone must admit that Obama has connected to something in the American collective psyche, and it can't all be due to image control and clever use of Facebook. For the first time...maybe ever, millions of Americans have a president with whom they feel they can identify.

For many years (well, at least the past two elections) politicians from both parties have insisted that they are appealing to "real Americans" in the "real America" that's out there somewhere.

Democrats and Republicans alike seem to agree on what this "real America" consists of: white residents of small towns in "the heartland," a vague area that seems to be defined only as being not the Northeast, California or Chicago. These "real Americans" are simple people with simple values--they like beer, they go to church (Protestant Christian of some sort) on Sunday, and they are not particularly well-educated or even well-traveled.

But wait! The actual real America--the one that can vote--just elected a dude named BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA. A bi-racial child of a white mother (born in Kansas only through the viccissitudes of the US Army) and Kenyan father. A self-identified Black man who spent his formative years being raised by a white family in Hawai'i--one of only four states in the US where whites do not comprise a majority of the population*, and the US state with the highest percentage of both indigenous people and people of mixed race. A son of a twice-divorced career woman who also had a child with an Indonesian man, a daughter who married a Canadian of Malaysian Chinese descent. Obama himself married a woman with a much more clasically African-American heritage: a descendant of slaves whose family migrated from South Carolina to Chicago.

This was a guy who lived in Jakarta after the brutal coup by the US-backed dictator Suharto, whose followers killed half a million people to take power; who lived in the New York City of Rent, when it was still possible to see a Broadway show for $3 (!); who lived in multi-ethnic Honolulu, Los Angeles and Chicago--all by the time he turned 25. (The New York Times ran a splendid editorial the other day in which six writers talked with surprising passion and detail about each of those places during those times.)

I grew up in Baltimore, a majority Black city (although you certainly wouldn't know it from my neighborhood or my high school.) I've lived in New York and Los Angeles since then. Growing up with only one kind of person around is as alien a thought to me as growing up in Jakarta or Honolulu is to some other people.

I recently watch an all-around fantastic movie called The Visitor. Look it up if you haven't seen it. The movie is based on a chance encounter between a middle-aged Connecticut college professor and the immigrant couple who have been illegally living in his vacant Manhattan apartment. (They are wise enough to know that leaving a two-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village vacant is a crime for which squatting is an entirely appropriate punishment.)

The professor, of course, studies globalization. "That's us!" the young man, Tarek, exclaims excitedly. "Syria and Senegal," he says, gesturing to himself and his girlfriend. When Tarek's mother shows up later in the film, she introduces herself to an Egyptian coffee shop owner as "Palestinian, from Damascus." In the US, she lives in Michigan--which, coincidentally, has the nation's second-largest Arab population after California.

What is the point of all this? It's not that the politicians' homogenous, white, Christian, small-town America isn't real--although it's certainly not the way the majority of Americans have lived for nearly 100 years, and is perhaps based on the disproportionate weight given to the American South in US politics. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with beer-drinking white Christians from small towns--although I would argue that isolation and homogenaeity have a conservatizing effect. It's just that the "other" America--urban, mobile, multi-ethnic; an America of multiple, overlapping and not always obvious identities, is at least as real as the "real America" the politicians talk about.

These are the people who, I would wager--whether they are African-American or not--saw a bit of themselves reflected in Barack Obama. And it seems to me that these other Americans, whose power has long been ignored, are the millions who came out into the street on election night and inauguration day.

*For the record, the other states with a minority white population are California, New Mexico, and (surprise!) Texas.