by Anthony Bruno
Movies "ripped from the headlines" do not always make ripping good yarns. The long-running television series Law & Order and its spin-offs usually pull it off using the kind of murder and mayhem dished up daily by the New York tabloids as fodder for their scripts. But the makers of Rendition took their material from the weightier news stories inside the broadsheets and tried to present a drama about people caught up in the thorny issues of handling world terrorism. Rendition, an up-close look at one case of extreme rendition in America's ongoing war on terror, bends over backwards to present all sides of the issue, but the end result is about as exciting at reading the op-ed page all the way through in one sitting. Reality unfortunately is not always entertaining.
The story begins when an Egyptian-American engineer named Anwar El-Ibrahimi (played by Omar Metwally) returns to the United States from a business trip to South Africa. He's taken into custody in Washington, D.C., suspected of having ties to a known terrorist. The C.I.A. secretly flies him to an unspecified country in northern Africa where he's handed over to a brutal police chief (Igal Naor) who specializes doing to suspects what American law enforcement cannot do at home. Naor's performance is a treat. With his shaved head and heavy features, he can make drinking tea look like a war crime.
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| Reese Witherspoon |
While Anwar is getting the third degree in a casbah dungeon, his very pregnant American wife Isabella (Reece Witherspoon) is told that her husband wasn't on his scheduled flight and is given a bureaucratic run-around when she tries to find him. She goes to an old college boyfriend (Peter Sarsgaard) who works for a powerful U.S. Senator (Alan Arkin), but no one wants to touch this hot potato. Witherspoon didn't need the eight-month pregnant belly to gain our sympathies; her righteous blue eyes get us every time. And Sarsgaard is very convincing as a political wonk who will only go so far for an old flame.
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| Meryl Streep |
The bureaucrat in charge of rendition, Corrinne Whitman (Meryl Streep), makes it very clear in her prim Southern way that no terrorist is going to slip through the cracks on her watch. She speaks of being a grandmother, but one has to wonder what timeouts were like when she was bringing up her own children.
The evidence against Anwar, while slight, is powerful enough to convince his captors that he knows something. While Isabella fights to get some straight answers in Washington, Douglas Freeman, a self-described C.I.A. "pen pusher" played by Jake Gyllenhaal, must step up to the plate when a colleague dies in a terrorist bombing. He must observe Anwar's horrific interrogation, sheepishly admitting that this is his "first torture."
Each character is set up to represent a position in the debate over extreme rendition, torture, and whether America should be doing this. Director Gavin Hood (whose film Tsotsi won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film in 2006) and screenwriter Kelley Sane go to great lengths to give each point of view equal time on the soapbox, but on the screen it comes down to a battle of acting skills and choices. Gyllenhaal's brooding humanitarian isn't as convincing delivering the morality argument as Streep is giving the security-for-the-masses, any-means-to-a-worthy-end position. In one short speech she lays it all out, loud and clear, delivering a devastating knockout punch (similar to an eye-opening speech she gave on the fashion industry in The Devil Wears Prada). While Gyllenhaal mopes and sighs, Streep declares. In this film the devil wears camo.
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| Jake Gyllenhaal |
Rendition bounces from one set of characters to another, never giving the viewer enough personal background to really understand what makes them tick. Gyllenhaal's character seems to have a lot of emotional baggage, but we never learn what it is. Streep's character doesn't seem to lose any sleep over torturing people who could be innocent, but was there something in her past that has made her so steely? And why is the police chief, a loving family man at home, able to torture a man to the edge of death without blinking an eye? The filmmakers are more interested in educating than entertaining, and so the audience is left to wonder what motivates these characters. They give us the facts but hold back on the personalities.
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