November 15, 2007
Redacted
I watched Brian De Palma's new movie Redacted this morning (HDNet featured a sneak preview of it last evening).
De Palma is one of my favorite directors, but I had found his Casualties of War, which has essentially the same story but takes place during the United States' war in Vietnam, very hard to watch, so I wasn't even sure I wanted to see Redacted.
I'm glad I did. Redacted is De Palma's crowning achievement in cinema. It's a fictionalized story based upon a real event of some American soldiers raping and killing a teenage girl and her family last year in Iraq. Given the incendiary topic, it's no wonder that it has stirred up some controversy.
De Palma shaped his film like a documentary with a cast of completely unknown actors, so it feels very real indeed. Actually there are two documentaries interwoven with each other. One is being made by an American soldier who has dreams of working in the movie business when he gets out of Iraq; he takes his camcorder with him and films his buddies in an effort to show the truth about the Iraq war. The other documentary is a French film that captures some of the same scenes but from the Iraqis' points of view. There is also some footage from security cameras, interrogation scenes, etc.
While some of the film is very heavy viewing, De Palma lets most of the worst horrors occur just out of view of the camera's lens.
The movie starts out slowly showing the boring routine that the soldiers go through day after day. The tension begins to rise when the American soldiers find it difficult to communicate with the Iraqi people. At an automobile checkpoint Iraqis sometimes mistake the American's hand sign for "stop" to be a friendly greeting. Tragic violence ensues, and an innocent Iraqi is killed. Then an American is killed by a hidden bomb. And then everything goes to hell.
De Palma and the film's producers like Mark Cuban are taking some heat from the idiots on the Right (like talk show blowhard Bill O'Reilly) for allegedly making an un-American movie, but it's nothing of the sort. It tries to depict and be fair to all sides, and it that it succeeds.
Highly recommended.
Posted by jt at November 15, 2007 03:06 PM