DIRECTED BY: BRIAN DE PALMA
STARRING: IZZY DIAZ, PATRICK CARROLL, DANIEL STEWART SHERMAN, ROB DEVANEY
BRIAN De Palma's new, experimental Iraq war film is a failure – a well-intentioned failure, but a failure nonetheless. It's a picture seething
with anger and resentment, but the anger and resentment it's likely to engender in audiences is that it's not a better film. A low-budget, quickly shot drama that makes use of the increasingly ubiquitous "found footage" device to reconstruct a horrific war crime perpetrated by American soldiers against a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, it has been made with all the passion and righteous indignation of a first-time film-maker, but none of wisdom or control you'd expect from a veteran with De Palma's level of experience. It's chaotic and scrappy, a little bit amateurish, and it bluntly hammers home its points in the most didactic way imaginable.
Of course, this direct-action approach may well be down to De Palma's own frustration at the inability of traditional films to effect change. He has, after all, already told this story once before with 1989's Casualties of War. That movie explored the rape and murder of a Vietnamese girl by US troops during the Vietnam conflict and Redacted, which revolves around a similar atrocity in Iraq, follows its plot points almost to the letter.
Both films are based on true events and, broadly speaking, make the same statements about the dehumanising nature of warfare. Yet in abandoning the grand sweep, haunting beauty and powerful performances of the earlier film in favour of techniques that transform the story into the cinematic equivalent of a "STOP THE WAR!" placard, it's as if De Palma is saying: "See! This is what happens when you ignore the lessons of history and send young, immature, psychologically ill-equipped men into battle on false pretences and expect them behave with decorum. I tried telling you this using art and was ignored. Maybe now you'll listen!"
Well, it's doubtful he'll have any more impact with the sledgehammer approach – mainly because the execution is so poor. Filtering the action through a variety of sources, including video diaries, news reports, documentary footage, security cameras, video blogs, jihadist websites and YouTube posts, Redacted is a worthy attempt to capture the fractured nature of the war experience and construct meaning from the multiple sources available to us in our surveillance-heavy times. It's natural territory for De Palma, too. From his earliest films such as Hi Mom! and Greetings, through the brilliant Blow Out and his Hitchcock knock-offs, Dressed to Kill and Body Double, he has long been interested in voyeurism, victimisation and the way the latter can be interpreted. So why does this subject seem so alien to him here?
The title is a reference to the practice of blacking out sensitive information in preparation for publication and, in his director's statement (always a sure sign of flawed filmmaking), De Palma makes no secret of the fact that he thinks the true story of Iraq has been "redacted from the mainstream corporate media". This, then, is his way of addressing the issue and giving us some sense of what's really going on.
Unfortunately, very little of his faux-raw footage is an any way believable or authentic-looking. The soldiers involved in the atrocity conform to the standard war movie archetypes and De Palma's unknown cast isn't skilled enough to inject them with a sense of life beyond this. You can see them trying to act, which breaks the illusion and fails to show how ignorance and repeated exposure to savagery can cause people to lose their moral compass.
Our specious entry point into this world is a young soldier called Salazar (Izzy Diaz) who is keeping a video record of everything that happens to him ("the truth, 24/7" as he puts it) in the naïve belief that this will get him into film school when he leaves the army. Really, though, this flimsy character motivation provides De Palma with an excuse to have his characters endlessly debate the ethics of filming atrocity in a similar fashion to George A Romero's current zombie snooze-fest Diary of the Dead.
And Salazar's footage also suffers from the Cloverfield effect; that is, it's far too slick. The same goes for the security camera footage that picks up with perfect clarity the guilty grunts espousing reams of expositional dialogue detailing the before-and-after of the rape.
Speaking of which, De Palma is careful to keep the film's central crime off screen to heighten the horror (and avoid charges of exploitation), but he undermines this by never giving us any sense of who the victim or her family are. When an angry anti-war protester later rants on the internet about how Hollywood movies perpetuate the idea that an American life is somehow more valuable, De Palma seems wholly oblivious to the fact that, by not providing us with any insights into the Iraqis in his film, Redacted is doing exactly the same. To make matters worse, he ends the film with a montage of photos of the mutilated, horrifically scarred bodies of children and pregnant women killed, so the film implies, as a result of the American presence in the region.
To De Palma's reported anger, the film's producers have, ironically, redacted their faces, but even so, this still seems like a cheap shot on the director's part. If he'd done his job properly, such shock tactics wouldn't be necessary and we'd leave the cinema feeling angry for the right reasons.
HOWLER OF THE WEEK10,000 BC
IF IT wasn't laughably bad enough already, 10,000 BC ratchets up the unintentional chuckle factor by having the hero, D'Leh, have a heart-to-heart with a shoddily rendered CGI sabre-tooth tiger that he sets free from a trap. It later returns the favour by coming to his rescue. Does the "BC" stand for Before Credibility?
The full article contains 1007 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
