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Redacted
The truth lies between the edits
2007
Review: October 12, 2007
Director: Brian De Palma
Starring: Patrick Carroll, Rob Devaney, Izzy Diaz, Mike Figueroa, Daniel Stewart Sherman
No.
THE SETUP:
A collage of video sources tells the story of a rape and murder committed by troops in Iraq.
DISCUSSION:
I have just walked out of the New York Film Festival screening of Redacted, which I was fairly crazed to see, and, minutes ago, shook the hand of my cinematic idol, Brian De Palma, and gave him the URL of this website. He accepted it with an air of weary resignation.
I was going to hold off and write about this tomorrow, but I can’t. The movie tells the story of a 15-year-old girl who was raped and set on fire by American troops. It is based on a true event, but everything about it has been fictionalized. The movie takes the form of a collection of video, from the “video diary” of one of the troops, Salazar, to a French documentary, a YouTube-type internet site, a Muslim YouTube-type side, and Al Jazeera-type news network, security camera footage, and more. We begin by meeting the troops, then go into the French documentary, which shows us the mechanics of a military checkpoint. De Palma introduced the film by saying there were no moments of levity, but it’s not entirely true, as I found the parody of the French documentary to be hilarious. We can tell many of the things we suspect about American troops in Iraq: they’re bored out of their minds. They are itching to do something—anything—to make it seem like something is happening. They’re terribly racist. They’re—my interpretation—not the brightest bulbs. We go along for a while getting to know them, seeing their routine, seeing someone die suddenly from am IED, seeing them razz each other, etc.
SPOILERS > > >
One night they go raid the home of a man, taking him prisoner. They see that this is where a pretty girl, one they would see every day at their checkpoint, lives. Flake, a skinny sociopath, and Rush, a chubby idiot, are drunk and suggest that they all go rape the girl. Salazar, the videographer, enthusiastically goes along, and so does McCoy, but to try to stop them. He is horrified, and repeatedly exhorts them to stop. Flake pulls a gun on him and orders him outside. They rape the girl and kill the rest of the family, setting fire to the house.
Afterward Rush intimidates the guys not to say anything, threatening them. We see an investigation, but the questioners focus on McCoy and how he didn’t actually see the rape, trying to bury the story. McCoy makes an anonymous tape and posts it on YouTube. Eventually he is back home, and De Palma’s voice is heard off camera [a la Black Dahlia] egging him to “tell a war story.” The film ends with a series of real photographs of Iraqi war victims, and closes with an artistic recreation of the rape victim.
< < < SPOILERS END
I didn’t know going in that this was going to be a recreation of the story of De Palma’s earlier Casualties of War. He explicitly acknowledged it as such during the discussion afterward, saying he used that story and characters as the framework for this one. As such, the biggest thing that stands out is the difference between the two forms. In Casualties, as a traditional fiction film, we have scenes of suspense, pathos, confrontation, that allow De Palma to use his skills to guide the audience through the emotions they should feel while watching the film. Here, since the footage ostensibly has different sources and the footage has the air of real happenings, we are at a much greater remove in terms of becoming involved with the characters and becoming invested in the story. One can see the appeal of this: De Palma has always been interested in the way images can be manipulated to convey truths that aren’t, and here that idea comes across quite forcefully: we see all these differing viewpoints, but know that reality falls somewhere in between. Much of the inspiration for the film, De Palma has said, came from finding YouTube footage of the war and Iraqi victims that are not allowed to be shown in the traditional media in the States, and this collage of differing footage inspired him to tell the story this way. The film mimics the way someone attempting to find unedited [non-redacted] information about the war would see it, and the way they would have to piece together the story themselves from whatever fragments they could find. As an idea, very interesting. As a movie, it’s hard to overcome the distancing effect. You watch the footage, you put together the various elements, but it’s just seeing something unpleasant. One cannot internalize the character’s feelings because the form itself is one of remove. Rather than a traditional movie, which invites you to vicariously become the film characters and by extension experience their journey, here the form itself lets you know that you are NOT a part of it, you are watching something that happened that you have no involvement in.
In the discussion afterward De Palma talked about his feeling of helplessness to stop or do anything about the war, which is paralleled in McCoy’s helplessness to stop the rape. This also mimics the audience’s reaction, which is that because of this emotional remove, one is unable to feel any control [false as that sense may be] over what one is experiencing, and I’m afraid that for me at least the result is a simple lack of response. One watches the footage unfold at a distance, and when it’s over one begins to think about getting something to eat.
It is certainly a bold experiment and I admire De Palma for taking this interesting departure, but I suspect the movie won’t have the impact one hopes it might. My sense when watching it, having gone in thinking that this is the film that might break De Palma through to the wide artistic respect he deserves, was the creeping sense of “Wow, NO ONE is going to see this film.” This will surely get good reviews [though it is actually drawing about half very bad ones] and is quite admirable, but it’s not the sort of thing anyone is going to tell anyone to be sure to see.
One of the most powerful statements the film inadvertently makes is in the final montage of real Iraq photographs, which have the faces of the victims obscured. “My own film has been redacted,” De Palma said, and it’s true; the releasing company forced him to obscure the faces in the photos to avoid lawsuits. The photo of the real rape victim had to be artistically recreated—a little too artistically for my taste. He had wanted to show some of the images the government won’t let us see, but been forced to edit them. Nevertheless, the effect is to reinforce the themes of the film: that the truth truly cannot be shown in this environment.
Ultimately, I’m glad I saw it, and I’m glad De Palma took this artistic change of direction, but I don’t think this film is going to make much of a difference to anyone. Unfortunately, I think De Palma is going to have to chalk it up as another one of his duds.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you like. It remains sadly inessential.
RELATED MOVIES:
CASUALTIES OF WAR is De Palma’s earlier, fiction-form telling of a similar story, set in Vietnam.
