thedrifter
02-19-08, 08:03 AM
Feb. 18, 2008, 4:35PM
DVD
Redacted is fiction based on fact
By AMY BIANCOLLI
Houston Chronicle
This film is entirely fictional," reads a disclaimer at the start of Redacted. ''It visually documents imagined events before, during and after a 2006 rape and murder in Samarra."
Reflect on this for a moment. The movie is fiction. The characters and events are imaginary, but they're depicted in a documentary style. And the tragedy at the center, the vicious sexual assault of an Iraqi teenager by American Marines, is based on last year's widely reported Army incident in the Iraqi town of Mahmudiyah.
This leaves us in a bit of a filmic pickle. Most fictional movies are upfront about being fiction; most nonfictional movies are upfront about being fact. Generally, even the most insolent and provocative mockumentaries honor this distinction, often with the judicious use of satire.
But this isn't satire. Writer-director Brian De Palma, in his follow-up to last year's Black Dahlia, brings no deft scalpel to Redacted, just a heavy hand and a blunt-instrument script that states the obvious loudly. Shot in high-definition video for a superficial glaze of authenticity, the film is full of diatribes and implied quotation marks, piecing together "footage" shot by an American private (Izzy Diaz), "exerpts" from a French "documentary," Al Jazeera "newscasts," YouTube "vlogs" and black-and-white security-camera "videos" illustrating sub rosa conversations between the perpetrators.
At the center of everything are a group of American servicemen as they guard a checkpoint north of Baghdad — on the look-out for enemies and I.E.D.'s, unsure how to tell a civilian or a sofa cushion from an insurgent or a bomb.
They're stressed beyond belief. They're exhausted. More than that: they're hackneyed, as stock and flat as a sheet of poster board. The two who commit the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl — and kill her family, and torch their home — are irredeemable, evil-incarnate, unrepentant scuzzbags, so devoid of normal human impulses that there's nothing to be learned from their crime. The relative unknowns playing them, Daniel Stewart Sherman and Patrick Carroll, do a competent enough job conjuring low-rent stereotypes, but why are they written that way? To illumine or appall?
In fairness to De Palma, I think he's aiming for the former — to show evil as an anomaly, evil-doers as intruders. But he mistakes heat for light and hyperbole for persuasion as he reduces one of the conflict's most horrifying incidents to a fictionalized, incendiary pantomime. Supporters of the Iraq war will likely shriek in protest over Redacted's rape-and-pillage depiction of Marines. Opponents should be out there shrieking, too: It does a disservice to their cause by demonizing American servicemen and over-simplifying the hellacious moral fall-out of combat.
So if you're looking for a film compiled from real footage shot by marines in Iraq, see The War Tapes. If you're looking for a straight-up documentary condemning the American occupation, see No End In Sight. If you're looking for a passionate, compassionate movie about the psychological damage done to servicemen in wartime, see In the Valley of Elah — or De Palma's own Casualties of War.
In its later reels, his new film turns to the aftermath of the tragedy and efforts to redact, or edit, the past. Nothing proves the point so directly or eloquently as a coda showing actual, grisly news photos of corpses and grieving Iraqis, their faces blacked out not by choice but legality. Their redaction serves as a wordless and paradoxical reproach to the film itself. For shouldn't a study in falsehood handle the truth with care?
amy.biancolli@chron.com
Ellie
DVD
Redacted is fiction based on fact
By AMY BIANCOLLI
Houston Chronicle
This film is entirely fictional," reads a disclaimer at the start of Redacted. ''It visually documents imagined events before, during and after a 2006 rape and murder in Samarra."
Reflect on this for a moment. The movie is fiction. The characters and events are imaginary, but they're depicted in a documentary style. And the tragedy at the center, the vicious sexual assault of an Iraqi teenager by American Marines, is based on last year's widely reported Army incident in the Iraqi town of Mahmudiyah.
This leaves us in a bit of a filmic pickle. Most fictional movies are upfront about being fiction; most nonfictional movies are upfront about being fact. Generally, even the most insolent and provocative mockumentaries honor this distinction, often with the judicious use of satire.
But this isn't satire. Writer-director Brian De Palma, in his follow-up to last year's Black Dahlia, brings no deft scalpel to Redacted, just a heavy hand and a blunt-instrument script that states the obvious loudly. Shot in high-definition video for a superficial glaze of authenticity, the film is full of diatribes and implied quotation marks, piecing together "footage" shot by an American private (Izzy Diaz), "exerpts" from a French "documentary," Al Jazeera "newscasts," YouTube "vlogs" and black-and-white security-camera "videos" illustrating sub rosa conversations between the perpetrators.
At the center of everything are a group of American servicemen as they guard a checkpoint north of Baghdad — on the look-out for enemies and I.E.D.'s, unsure how to tell a civilian or a sofa cushion from an insurgent or a bomb.
They're stressed beyond belief. They're exhausted. More than that: they're hackneyed, as stock and flat as a sheet of poster board. The two who commit the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl — and kill her family, and torch their home — are irredeemable, evil-incarnate, unrepentant scuzzbags, so devoid of normal human impulses that there's nothing to be learned from their crime. The relative unknowns playing them, Daniel Stewart Sherman and Patrick Carroll, do a competent enough job conjuring low-rent stereotypes, but why are they written that way? To illumine or appall?
In fairness to De Palma, I think he's aiming for the former — to show evil as an anomaly, evil-doers as intruders. But he mistakes heat for light and hyperbole for persuasion as he reduces one of the conflict's most horrifying incidents to a fictionalized, incendiary pantomime. Supporters of the Iraq war will likely shriek in protest over Redacted's rape-and-pillage depiction of Marines. Opponents should be out there shrieking, too: It does a disservice to their cause by demonizing American servicemen and over-simplifying the hellacious moral fall-out of combat.
So if you're looking for a film compiled from real footage shot by marines in Iraq, see The War Tapes. If you're looking for a straight-up documentary condemning the American occupation, see No End In Sight. If you're looking for a passionate, compassionate movie about the psychological damage done to servicemen in wartime, see In the Valley of Elah — or De Palma's own Casualties of War.
In its later reels, his new film turns to the aftermath of the tragedy and efforts to redact, or edit, the past. Nothing proves the point so directly or eloquently as a coda showing actual, grisly news photos of corpses and grieving Iraqis, their faces blacked out not by choice but legality. Their redaction serves as a wordless and paradoxical reproach to the film itself. For shouldn't a study in falsehood handle the truth with care?
amy.biancolli@chron.com
Ellie