The Frenzy On... Redacted

..Gary Dretzka
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Doug Pratt
..Ray Pride

I Wish Redacted
Was Retracted

While the first Gulf War produced two very good films (Courage Under Fire and Jarhead) and one masterpiece (Three Kings), we have yet to see a feature film about this go-around in Iraq that has been completely successful. It has seemed so far that most of the filmmakers who have decided to take on this tricky material have been more interested in proselytizing to an audience that already agrees with them. People who still believe that the war in Iraq is worthwhile aren’t the folks who will pay their hard-earned cash to see a film like In the Valley of Elah or Redacted, so the folks that do sit down to see the movie wind up being beaten over the head with a message that they already agree with for the most part.

I was thinking about this when I watched Redacted the other night and couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps Brian De Palma was really a Republican trying to make a polemic so one-sided and trite that it would turn off most liberals. This is a film that was so miscalculated from the get-go that it is almost brilliant in the way it stitches together every possible cliché and makes them even more uninteresting by using a movie within a movie and then a movie within that movie and vodcasts that seem to have little relation to the rest of the material.

There is nothing that the style of this film adds to the substance in any material wa,y and it almost makes me sad that De Palma tries to be “hip” with his use of webcams and mockumentaries, settling for amateur angles and compositions when he has earned a reputation as a filmmaker that knows how to frame a shot. It’s interesting because De Palma’s movies often have a kind of self-reflexive bent to them, making the viewer aware of the fact that they are indeed watching a film and often has movies within the movies or scenes of voyeurism sprinkled throughout. Here, however, the thought is not fully-formed and it seemed only reason for it was to make it seem modern and to try to appeal to the kids, who wouldn’t be watching this film anyway. It’s never a pleasure to watch an accomplished filmmaker try so hard to change his style and then fail so miserably. It’s admirable that he would try out new techniques, but I can’t support this change in direction.

Some people complain that De Palma is stealing from Hitchcock or Antonioni or Eisenstein, but I’ve never been bothered by this because his intent seemed to be more homage than theft and I found him to have a particular vision. He is obsessed with obsession and in awe of voyeurism and these themes are ones that weave themselves into most of his pictures, exploring the dark side of our nature and our desire to watch and do nothing.

Now, I’m no great De Palma fan, but I do consider him a filmmaker whose pictures are always worth a viewing, even when they are as mediocre as Snake Eyes or as flat-out awful as The Black Dahlia. Even in those films there was something worth watching. In Snake Eyes, there is that beautiful twenty-minute long tracking shot at the start of the film that follows Nicolas Cage’s character in the lead-up to a boxing match and The Black Dahlia has so many gorgeous shadows and terrific shots that at times it looks like a moving painting, even if the film was wildly miscast and becomes unintentionally campy. Mission to Mars has some brilliant and strange material at the end of the film and it winds up being one of the most interesting, if flawed, sci-fi films to come along in a while (even if it flat-out steals from Kubrick at times). And Femme Fatale has a truly mesmerizing opening sequence at the Cannes Film Festival that is near-genius in both idea and execution, even if the film immediately flat-lines soon after. But after watching Redacted, I couldn’t help but think about how much I’m really starting to miss the man who brought us The Untouchables, Carrie, Sisters and Blow-Out. Those movies may not be perfect, but they are made by a filmmaker who cares about the story and the craft of making film throughout the entire running time, caring enough to mold a suspenseful plot that last through the entire running time.

The last film of De Palma’s that I really enjoyed top to bottom was actually the first Mission: Impossible and the last film of his that I truly loved was Casualties of War. That last film is the one that was on my mind while I watched Redacted because the central storyline is essentially the same; it is the story of how war can make people do awful things, including the rape of an innocent girl, and it is about how even the people who are morally opposed to that action stay quiet out of fear. It is a fascinating moral dilemma that speaks to the larger issues of the war themselves, but while Casualties of War had over a decade to brew and put the actions of that war in context, Redacted is coming out in theaters in the middle of our current conflict. Casualties of War might have chided the military and its soldiers for being so cavalier with the lives and the minds of the Vietnamese civilians, but it was years after the conflict had ended. Redacted makes no excuses for being an all-out attack on the troops, with nobody resembling the Michael J. Fox character from the previous film in sight.

I don’t want to get into a political rant, so I am skirting certain issues, but I found Redacted to be outright offensive in its condemnation of our troops. There seems to be a generalization put forth in this film that all of our troops will either commit atrocities or they will turn the other way when these atrocities occur. In Casualties of War, we had the main character who might have been meek at first, but he stands up for that girl and he is haunted every day of his life for what he allowed happen to her, even if her assailants got their just desserts. The harrowing stories of innocent civilians being victimized need to be told, but it seems a bit odd to me that De Palma has now made two films in this vein and they are both stories about American soldiers doing the victimizing.

In Redacted, we don’t have that main character or any character who stands up for what is good and what is just. Instead, we have a bunch of cookie-cutter cardboard cut-outs and they are played poorly by amateur and amateurish actors. There is no Sean Penn or John C. Reilly in this film. At the very least, even if you’re with De Palma all the way on this one, it’s impossible to get past the acting and the staging of this film. It seems like a student production from beginning to end, which is enraging to me because I expect so much more from a filmmaker like De Palma.

The first scene of the film has the main five soldiers being videotaped by one of their peers since he wants to go to school to become a filmmaker after “all this” is over, and immediately the scene rings false because of the way the actors speak to each other and act around one another. The dialogue is amazingly expositional, especially considering these are five guys who have spent a lot of time together - the way they interact with one another seems unnatural. This is a problem because the film is trying to be very naturalistic, setting up a world where we are supposed to believe the events that take place are real. This is unusual for most De Palma films, which take place in an almost hyper-real world and it is clear from the start that he is out of his element.

There is another scene in the film right before the main incident, where the characters are sitting around talking and playing poker. They start drinking and immediately, the two ornery guys get even angrier and decide that, basically, they want to commit sins against innocent people. That’s it, that’s their entire motivation, they are drunk and want to do something "fun.” In Casualties of War, there is enough time to set up what kind of person Sean Penn is and it doesn’t set him up as an entirely bad person, but when they aren’t allowed to go into town to blow off steam, it makes him go mad. In this film, the two bad guys just want to do bad things because the script tells them to. Perhaps the reason this film seems more offensive to the troops than Casualties of War is simply a matter of the talent-level in front of the camera; perhaps when there are talented actors doing solid work and creating human beings, it’s easier to understand and even sympathize while they are committing atrocities. When the actors can’t even put one sentence together and make it ring true, then the experience will seem hollow and false.

I understand that much of what happens in this film is based on real events and that is a tragedy. However, I remember learning something in one of my creative writing classes and that is this: it doesn’t matter if it is real, it has to feel real. This is where the word "verisimilitude” would be brought up, because it’s not enough for a movie to be based on real events in order to be successful. The film doesn’t have any interest in making you believe that the events that occur feel realistic because it’s enough in the minds of the filmmakers that it is real, but we don’t know the characters nearly well enough for us to know whether their actions fall in line with their behavior or if this is an aberration.

During the end credits, there are images of wounded civilians that appear on the screen and while these pictures are truly horrific, it is a jolt of reality into a film that felt like a fantasy. These images are not earned, not by this film, and the victims in those pictures deserve a better memorial than to be tacked on to the end of a film that uses them for shock value and political credibility. The filmmaker decided that ninety minutes of a feature film didn’t make its point cogently enough, so here are some pictures that will do a much better job. And they do.

After seeing Redacted, I watched the documentary No End in Sight and was amazed at how much I learned about the inner-workings of our government during that war and all the mistakes that we had made. I gleaned so much information from Charles Ferguson’s documentary that I was able to finally understand why there is so much sectarian violence in Iraq. I urge everyone to seek out this film. De Palma’s film doesn’t seem to care about issues like, “why are things so messed up?” Instead, he seems more interested in making a film that portrays our soldiers as buffoons who act on impulse, obviating the need for further discussion on what brought us there and what could have been done better.

I learned more about the people of Iraq and our own soldiers in ten minutes of No End in Sight than I did in the entirety of Redacted. I’m tempted to say that some subjects are just better fits for documentary, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I believe that one day, a filmmaker will make a definitive feature film about our current imbroglio in Iraq, but I know that that filmmaker is not Brian De Palma and Redacted is not that movie.

- Noah Forrest
November 12, 2007

Other columns by Noah Forrest
10.30.07 - Oscar, Don't Forget the Subtle Guys
10.30.07 - Ridley Scott - Overrated?
10.21.07 - Clooney Straddling The Line
10.08.07 - Wes Anderson
10.02.07 - Jake Paltrow's The Good Night
09.27.07 - Cleaning House
09.20.07 - Top 10 To Date
09.13.07 - Film Vs Television
08.31.07 - Halloween Review
08.28.07 - Who Is The Next Scorsese?
08.21.07 - Fall Preview
08.14.07 - The Horrific State Of The Horror Film
08.10.07 - Reservations About Catherine Zeta-Jones
08.07.07 - Saving Steven Spielberg
07.30.07 - Skinheads in the Cinema & This Is England
07.28.07 - Siena Miller: Good or Evil?
07.26.07 - The Frenzy on the Wall

Noah Forrest is a 24 year old aspiring writer/filmmaker in New York City.

The opinions expressed in these columns are the writers and do not neccessarily reflect the opinions of Movie City News or any of its editors or other contributors.

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