Uncle Sam Wants You! "RENDITION"

“Rendition” A film, directed by Gavin Hood, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon, Omar Metwally, Meryl Streep, and Peter Saarsgard

“Rendition” by South African director Gavin Hood (“Tsotsi“), is a muddle of a film about an extremely important subject: The United States’ practice of “extraordinary rendition.” This action by the Bush administration where people (usually men of Middle-Eastern origin) are snatched off the streets or from their homes, handcuffed, hooded, tossed into an airplane and sent to a distant country, like Egypt, for instance, where torture plays a distinct part of interrogations. It has been proven that torture does not elicit truth but lies, often sending officials off in the wrong direction, allowing bad things happen elsewhere. Gavin Hood, rather than focusing on this harrowing experience which befalls a young couple, introduces a distracting subplot: that of a North African intelligence officer and his rebellious daughter.

Whether people in the States are aware of it, the film is based on facts. At this time, about five men have suffered, or are suffering, this fate. One, Khaled El Masri, is a German citizen, the other, Italian. Both are of Middle-Eastern descent. Of the five, only two have been released from prisons outside the US, after five months or more without being charged. El-Masri is represented by ACLU attorney, Ben Wizner. They have sued the US Government. Recently, the case went to the Supreme Court, who denied them a hearing.

In the film, the couple, Isabella and Anwar el-Hashimi, played by Reese Witherspoon and Omar Metwally, has one child and one on the way, they live in a Chicago suburb. Anwar happens to be an Egyptian legal immigrant with an American college degree in chemical engineering; he’s been in the US for twenty years and his wife is an American citizen. Returning home from a business trip to South Africa, he is detained at the Chicago airport. American officials, after a call to the smarmily smug CIA official, Corrinne Whitman (Meryl Streep, demeaned in a caricature performance), handcuff and hood Anwar, throw him into a van, and delete his name from the passenger list. He is not allowed to phone his wife. Anwar has a similar last name as a suspected terrorist behind a recent suicide bombing Once he’s detained, and uncooperative because he’s innocent, he’s shoved on to a plane and flown to an unnamed foreign site. In an earlier scene, a bustling plaza in a large North African city is struck by a bomb, killing Dixon, the CIA mentor of junior analyst Doug Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal). Freeman (an allegorical name?) ends up as an agent with a conscience. He and Dixon have been investigating intelligence about a suicide bomber. Freeman is recalled to Washington where he‘s told he is taking Dixon‘s place. “I‘m an analyst,” he protests. Whitman, his boss, sneers to her aides, “An analyst is not a jackal.“

Undone by her husband’s disappearance, yet, maintaining control, Isabella enlists the help of an old college boyfriend, Alan Smith (Peter Saarsgard), who now works as a senator’s aide (a deft, crisp Alan Alda). It’s heartbreaking to watch a very pregnant woman futilely, it turns out, traipsing disconsolately through corridors of glass, steel, and chrome in a Washington office building. There, she confronts a glacial Whitman, who brushes her off like an imaginary speck on her white silk blouse, and is all but hauled away by security guards.

Few are aware that there are places outside the country that torture people for the US, thus allowing the US to truthfully state, “We don’t torture in Amurrica,” a line Whitman parrots when Doug tells her, “This is my first torture.” She believes she is saving innocent lives. In real life, like the film, not one elected official will admit that the US practices extraordinary rendition, though articles and books have been published on the subject. In fact, Robert Baer, an ex CIA agent on whose book George Clooney’s film, “Syriana” was based, and who has had first-hand experience with the practice, was an advisor on “Rendition.”

Though records clear Anwar, Whitman keep mum, wanting him to pay for Dixon’s death. In prison, a naked, beaten, uncooperative Anwar is tortured by head intelligence chief, Abasi Fawal (Yigal Naor - -Telly Salavas on steroids). The director doesn’t spare us from realistic scenes of water-boarding and beatings, but films only the excruciating expressions on Anwar’s bruised and bloody face as he suffers electric jolts to the genitals, telegraphed by buzzing sounds. In the CIA position of observer, Freeman reluctantly watches. Without speaking, Gyllenhaal’s eyes and body language speak volumes. Out of his league after taking Dixon’s job, he soon has had enough. Using his own creative subterfuge, local help, and distracted prison officials, he manages Anwar’s release.

“Rendition” jumps distractingly back and forth among scenes of Isabella’s attempts at finding Anwar, Fawal running around after his daughter, and Anwar’s incarceration. To confuse us further, a scene close to the end of the film repeats one shown at the start. Only then do we realize that the bombing at the beginning of the film was a flash-forward. Still, what this film makes disturbingly clear is the US government’s determination to finger anybody as a terrorist to compensate for the death of one or many of its own. Evidence may be unearthed by family and friends to back up an alibi at the time of a crime, but, if Uncle Sam wants you! you’re as good as dead. Though Gavin Hood obviously wanted his film to make a strong statement about the US practice of “extraordinary rendition” it doesn’t. No one is taken to task. The CIA walks away, washing its bloody hands of the matter.

Gavin Hood was interviewed by ACLU’s Ben Wizner about “Rendition”. He asked Wizner about the apathy of Americans towards matters like rendition and the so-called war on terrorisim in general, answering his own question by alluding to fear of executive power for speaking out. Neither proposed a solution. Hood wished his film could have been longer, saying that at two hours the film could not have gone into detail. If he’d omitted the subplot of Fawal’s daughter and her boyfriend, he could have made a much better and more resonant film.

Recent articles in a couple of mainstream magazines state that the documentary and fictional films that have come out over the past year dealing with subversive, immoral “wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, perpetrated by the US and its contractors, like Blackwater, are not getting the audiences they should; filmmakers and critics are asking why? One asks ”Is it too soon because these ‘wars‘ are ongoing? Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly, surmised that ‘too soon’ has become not just our explanation but our excuse. “A knee-jerk justification for an America that has checked out on the promise of movies that delve into the issue of our time.” These films are: “In the Valley of Elah,” with Tommy Lee Jones; the documentary, “No End in Sight,” “A Mighty Heart,” with major box-office draw Angelina Jolie, Jaimie Foxx in “The Kingdom,” and “Rendition.”

Due out this month is “Redacted,” a film by Brian de Palma. It is a fictionalized version of a real atrocity: the rape of a teenage Iraqi girl, her and her family’s subsequent murder by a US Army squad. In a recent interview, with David Ansen of “Newsweek,” he said that he hopes that “Redacted” will jump start anti-war soldiers into action. De Palma also stated that people are not fervently active in protesting the so-called wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because they are not getting the images on television as during the Viet Nam war. “We don’t’ see Iraqi casualties,” he said, a fact that weighed in on his justification for making ”Redacted.” He went on to say that the Pentagon controls what’s seen in the media regarding images of wounded, dead and dying Iraqis and soldiers. This American defense operation recalled the impact the images made - - turning people against the Viet Nam war; it did not want to make the same mistake. Still, the images are out there if one knows where to look. Ansen brought out the fact that more people turn out in one day to see a huge Hollywood blockbuster than see documentary films like “Gunnar Palace,” No End it Sight,” or “The War Tapes,” during their entire run, films that are made to protest an unpopular, ongoing, “war.” The question remains: are audiences willing to pay to see more of these painful images? The answer still may be a disheartening “No.” Yet, flmmakers will not give up. More films on Iraq and Afghanistan are being released before the end of the year: Redford’s “Lions for Lambs,” Tom Hanks‘ “Charlie Wilson’s War,” and “Grace is Gone,” with John Cusack.