Review of Redacted

De Palma aims high with this ambitious fake-doc, but fails to make the most of a novel concept

by Zachary Wigon 

“What we are watching as we sit paralyzed in our fold-down seats isn’t ‘like a film’; it is a film. With a script, a screenplay, that has to be followed unswervingly. The casting and the technical and financial resources have all been meticulously scheduled: these are professionals at work. Including control of the distribution channels. In the end, operational war becomes an enormous special effect; cinema becomes the paradigm of warfare, and we imagine it as ‘real’, whereas it is merely the mirror of its cinematic being.” – Jean Baudrillard Jean Baudrillard wrote in The Intelligence of Evil, one of his final works, about the inherently cinematic qualities of modern warfare. As evidenced in the epigraph above, he found modern war (he was speaking specifically of the ongoing war in Iraq) to be essentially cinematic. One of the observations underscoring this point is that the war in Iraq has been excessively catalogued through video footage. Embedded reporters, surveillance cameras, soldiers with their own camcorders from home, professional documentary filmmakers at work, et cetera. Taken from this perspective, one could make the argument that there is not one war, but many, each with its own cinematic existence. Coming from this ideological position, it would be easy to see the merits of the formal approach Brian De Palma has chosen for his latest film, Redacted. The film’s narrative concerns a group of American soldiers stationed in Iraq, and the film is edited together as a compendium of various diegetically justified cameras. The “documentary footage” in the film is set up to come from, amongst other sources, the videos of a Private (Angel Salazar, played by newcomer Izzy Diaz) stationed amongst the squadron; a documentary for a French television channel; an embedded journalist’s reporting; a tape made by a Muslim terrorist group; and so on. The effect of this is initially somewhat jarring, but as the film progresses and the narrative pacing becomes clear, the formal technique fades more and more into the background, and the potential for the idea greatly outweighs how De Palma ends up (not) putting it to use. However, there are a few moments when the omnipresence of the various media sources does achieve poignancy. The most noteworthy of them is when, after having seen a terrorist group’s video blog of an American being blown up by a land mine, we see an American GI’s wife’s website, with a video blog playing that appears to have used the same video embedding technology. Same exact form, radically different content; it’s an old point, but a powerful one when viewed in such a context. The film’s plot, which doesn’t significantly begin to take shape until midway through the film, concerns Angel and his friends B.B. (Daniel Stewart Sherman), Reno (Patrick Carroll), Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney) and Gabe (Kel O’Neil). From the start, characterization makes way for caricature. B.B. and Rush are redneck racist misanthropes, Gabe is a bookish intellectual who pushes his copy of Appointment In Samarra upon everyone (they’re stationed there – get it?), Angel is an opportunistic filmmaker who dreams of getting into film school based on his footage from Iraq, and Lawyer is a do-gooder who blanches in the face of real danger. The first half of the film consists mainly of an anthropological look at the lives of the soldiers (especially in the segments done as a French TV special). How do they behave when cars don’t heed their instructions at checkpoints? How do they communicate with friends back home? What do they do in their leisure time? Unfortunately, De Palma’s observations regarding these questions, and the others, fall significantly short of anything a well-informed audience member won’t already know. Iraqi drivers misunderstand American hand signals, and are shot at checkpoints. American soldiers play a lot of cards, use video-chat technology often, and look at a lot of pornographic magazines, while they wistfully think of the girls back home. The beneficial aspect of this kind of anthropological representation is that the viewer is placed (somewhat) in the mindset of an American soldier, as opposed to simply reading about such activities and coming to one’s own conclusions about what it must be like to live such a lifestyle. The central event of the film, which comes in midway through, is the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl at the hands of B.B. and Rush, filmed by Angel. How the soldiers behave towards one another in light of the atrocity, and what the reaction of the Muslim community is, provides for the film’s dramatic tension. However, it’s difficult to take the film seriously by this point, because the callousness and sadism of B.B. and Rush is so extreme that one’s disbelief cannot be suspended any longer. Throughout the film, there are very few attempts made to instill empathy for the soldiers – instead, there is a veritable vilification that is put forth, a hostility that is extended to almost all of them. A Lefty myself, I still could not help but say as I watched the film, “American GI’s cannot be that bad.” Rednecks from the south who espouse racial epithets as if it were their job, B.B. and Rush cannot be accepted as anything other than two cases of very bad writing. In addition to the lack of characterization, there are numerous aesthetic/formal problems with the film. Due to the fact that he wanted actors with unrecognizable faces, many of the actors in Redacted have had careers primarily in theater. The result is scenes of dialogue with a genuinely theatrical quality, when what is called for is an understated realism (a film like this would require an Andrew Bujalski at the helm). Even if the dialogue was less extreme in its subject matter, it wouldn’t be taken seriously due to the nature of the performances. The mimicking of various aesthetics – home movie, TV documentary, embedded reporter – feels more like a parody of these styles than the styles themselves. Additionally, the shaky handheld camerawork, the middling quality of the digital footage, and the similarity of locations – all elements present in each “style” – create the feeling that, by the end of the film, the various segments have not been as different as we first thought. A genuine aesthetic breaking-off is what was called for, but what De Palma gives us is the same style through various filters. If De Palma had attempted to portray any one of the many predicaments American soldiers can easily find themselves in at war, if he had attempted to examine the complexity of the situation from a psychological perspective, he could have had a real film on his hands. Instead he has something that feels more like a polemic than a work of art. Polemicism is usually best left to the pages of angry essays and dissenting op-eds; to ram it through a work of art – something that is usually about subtlety, complexity and ambiguity – is to create a work that feels like a mere means to an end. To have explored the multitudinous ways in which the war in Iraq has been represented onscreen would have been a worthy artistic effort. Instead, by the end of the film, one realizes that one has been shown not an exploration, but a narrow repetition. -- Zachary Wigon

Posted on 10/04/07 by: FC Scribes 09:30 PM