Expediente Anwar

"I fear you speak upon the rack, where men enforced do speak anything." This Shakespearean line from The Merchant of Venice is echoed again in the new film Rendition which introduces the viewer to the "enhanced methods of interrogation", renditions, which began in the Clinton Administration and have become more commonplace since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.

The film features an all-star cast, with Oscar winners Meryl Streep, Alan Arkin, and Reese Witherspoon, as well as Peter Sarsgaard, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Omar Metwally. Supporting roles filled by unfamiliar actors deliver as well, sucking the audience into the plot, and showing how many people can be affected by overseas terror attacks, and our means of investigating them.

Rendition follows an Egyptian born terrorism suspect (Metwally) who is taken by U.S. officials following his flight from South Africa to Washington DC to an undisclosed prison overseas. His pregnant wife (Witherspoon) ventures to Washington DC to find out about his disappearance through a family friend and Senator's employee (Sarsgaard). Gyllenhaal plays a young CIA analyst at the overseas detention facility who monitors the violent interrogation.

This film follows the emotional plights of the torture victim (Metwally), and those involved in obtaining the supposed information from him. Some, like the CIA analyst (Gyllenhaal), are visibly shaken and horrified by the methods exercised, while others, the stern Senator (Streep) and foreign interrogator (Yigal Naor), see it as necessary and effective.

The film may be described by some as a political piece, but is ultimately an emotional one. Metwally's performance as the tortured prisoner is Oscar-worthy. The film does not intend to preach, but rather to question and inform the audience on a topic that does not often have a human face put on it. Renditions have been known to work, but have also been known to produce false information from innocent prisoners. The film simply depicts the emotional struggles of those involved in such grave business, and does so in a way that will affect every viewer differently. The film will keep your interest, and have you engaged in each of the character's plights.

I'm Egyptian. I have a green card. I have been living in the US since 1991. I have a very common Arabic name. I'm married (non-American but non-Egyptian, non-Arab wife). I have children who are born in the US. I have a PhD in Cell Biology from the US and I travel for conferences. I make 6 figure income and I own a home in the Washington, DC area. I pay my taxes and outside 1 or 2 parking tickets I have no blemish on my record since I came to this country in 1991. I look more Egyptian than the Ibrahimi character but my spoken English is as good as his.

A couple of months ago I was returning from a conference/company business in Spain through Munich Germany to Washington, DC (Home). I was picked up in Munich airport by a German officer as soon as I got off the Madrid plane. He was waiting for me. He was about to start interrogating me until I simply told him "I have no business in Germany, I'm just passing through". He had let me go with the utmost disappointment. That was nothing compared to what happened at Washington, Dulles airport (Which was not nearly as bad as what happened to Ibrahimi in the movie). The customs officer asked me a couple of questions about the length and purpose of my trip. He then wrote a letter C on my custom declaration form and let me go. After I picked up my checked bag I was stopped at the last exit point (Some Homeland Security crap). I sat there for 3 hours along with many different people of many different nationalities. I was not told the reason for my detainment. I was not allowed to use my phone or ANY other phone. I was feisty at first asking to be told of the reason or let me go but decided to suck it up and just wait and see. I asked if I can call my wife to tell her that I'm going to be late but was told no. When I tried to use my phone and as soon as my wife said "hello", an officer yanked the phone out of hand and threatened me to confiscate it. When I asked about needing to call home because my family is waiting, they said "Three hours is nothing, we will make contact after 5 hours". When I asked to use the bathroom, an officer accompanied me there. It toilet was funny; I guess it was a prison style toilet that is all metal with no toilet seat. Finally, they called my name and gave me my passport/green card and said you can go. I asked what the problem was, they said "nothing"!! I know it was only 3 hours but I was dead tired and wanted to go home to see my wife and kids.

As for the movie, it was very well made. Unlike most movies that involve Arabs and use non-Arab actors who just speak gibberish, this movie the Arabic was 100% correct. I assume the country is Morocco (North Africa).

In this day and age in which just about every other news story involves discussions of waterboarding, images of Abu Ghraib, or tales of forced detentions at Guantanamo Bay, Gavin Hood's "Rendition" is about as up-to-the-minute and timely a movie as is ever likely to come out of the entertainment mills of mainstream Hollywood. It's not, by any stretch of the imagination, a perfect film, but neither does it merit the caterwauling opprobrium it has received at the hands of critics from all across the ideological and political spectrum.

The term "rendition" refers to the ability of the CIA to arrest any individuals it suspects of terrorist dealings, then to whisk them away in secret to a foreign country to interrogate and torture them for an indefinite period of time, all without due process of law. Anwar El-Ibrahimi is an Egyptian man who has been living for twenty years in the United States. He has an American wife, a young son and a new baby on the way. He seems a very unlikely candidate for a terrorist, yet one day, without warning or explanation, Anwar is seized and taken to an undisclosed location where he is subjected to brutal torture until he admits his involvement with a terrorist organization that Anwar claims to know nothing about.

On the negative side, "Rendition" falters occasionally in its storytelling abilities, often biting off a little more than it can chew in terms of both plot and character. The ostensible focal point is Douglas Freeman, a rookie CIA agent who is brought in to observe Anwar's "interrogation" at the hands of Egyptian officials. The problem is that, as conceived by writer Kelley Sane and enacted by Jake Gyllenhaal, Freeman seems too much of a naïve "boy scout" to make for a very plausible agent, and he isn't given the screen time he needs to develop fully as a character. We know little about him at the beginning and even less, it seems, at the end. He "goes through the motions," but we learn precious little about the man within. Thus, without a strong center of gravity to hold it all together, the film occasionally feels as if it is coming apart at the seams, with story elements flying off in all directions. A similar problem occurs with Anwar's distraught wife, played by Reese Witherspoon, a woman we never get to know much about apart from what we can see on the surface. Gyllenhaal and Witherspoon have both proved themselves to be fine actors under other circumstances, but here they are hemmed in by a restrictive screenplay that rarely lets them go beyond a single recurring note in their performances.

What makes "Rendition" an ultimately powerful film, however, is the extreme seriousness of the subject matter and the way in which two concurrently running plot lines elegantly dovetail into one another in the movie's closing stretches. It may make for a slightly more contrived story than perhaps we might have liked on this subject, but, hey, this is Hollywood after all, and the film has to pay SOME deference to mass audience expectations if it is to get itself green lighted, let alone see the light of day as a completed project.

Two of the supporting performances are particularly compelling in the film: Omar Metwally who makes palpable the terror of a man caught in a real life Kafkaesque nightmare from which he cannot awaken, and Yigal Naor who makes a surprisingly complex character out of the chief interrogator/torturer. Meryl Streep, Alan Arkin and Peter Sarsgaard also make their marks in smaller roles. Special mention should also be made of the warm and richly hued cinematography of Dion Beebe.

Does the movie oversimplify the issues? Probably. Does it stack the deck in favor of the torture victim and against the evil government forces? Most definitely. (One wonders how the movie would have played if Anwar really WERE a terrorist). Yet, the movie has the guts to tread on controversial ground. It isn't afraid to raise dicey questions or risk the disapproval of some for the political stances it takes. It openly ponders the issue of just how DOES a nation hold fast to its hard-won principle of "civil liberties for all" in the face of terrorism and fear. And just how much courage does it take for people of good will to finally stand up and say "enough is enough," even at the risk of being branded terrorist-appeasing and unpatriotic by those in power? (The movie also does not, in any way, deny the reality of extreme Islamic terrorism).

Thus, to reject "Rendition" out of hand would be to allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. "Rendition" may not be perfect, but it IS good, and it has something of importance to say about the world in which we now live. And that alone makes it very much worth seeing.

The powerhouse cast pulls the crowd in the theatre, despite the ominous title. Jake Gyllenhaal guested on Conan O'Brien to promote the movie and explained that 'Rendition' was a euphemism for obtaining information via torture. Since 9/11, 'extraordinary rendition' allowed the government's intelligence agency to extricate people unquestioningly without due process and use any means necessary in exchange for information.

Gyllenhaal plays rookie CIA analyst Douglas Freeman (note the irony) who is torn about his assignment which renders him as a mere observer to unorthodox interrogation proceedings at an underground detention facility outside the US.

Omar Metwally plays the suspected terrorist Anwar El-Ibrahimi, Egyptian national and green card-carrying hubby of American Isabella Fields El-Ibrahimi (Reese Witherspoon). Isabella and her son wait for Anwar to come home from a scientific conference when he suddenly disappears from the plane's passenger manifest. She seeks help from her college friend who works in government and learns that the Head of Intelligence, Corrine Whitman (Meryl Streep) is behind it all.

Rendition is directed by Hollywood newbie Gavin Hood (who is set to do X-Men Origins: Wolverine), and begs the question of whether such 'extraordinary rendition' is exercised in real life. The movie was released locally in the wake of the Glorietta explosion (bombing/mishap?), and a pivotal scene in the movie is when a bomb explodes in a public plaza, so that must have sent chills up every moviegoer's spine. Seeing the exploding tableau with a lone red and yellow sign Aajala (Ayala?) on the upper right hand of the screen, plus the effect of silence and slow-moving images magnified the impact of the scene's real-life coincidence.

There are lessons to learn from this movie and it all boils down to personal decisions we make, daily. We all have choices we can exercise at will, and we often do not always (want to) see how these affect others, who may end up as hapless victims of circumstance. What 'the greater good' is should not have to be a forced choice our leaders have to take if we each already decide correctly at the source. Now that's a utopia worth building.

Reviewed at the World Premiere screening at Roy Thomson Hall, on Sept. 7, 2007 during the Toronto International Film Festival.

On the surface, this would seem to have everything going for it with a solid cast (veterans Witherspoon, Sarsgaard, Gyllenhaal, Streep, Arkin and new faces Metwally, Naor, Oukach, Khouas) a recent hot director (Gavin Hood, dir. of "Tsotsi", winner of the 2006 Oscar for Best Foreign Film) and a script on a current hot-button issue (the anti-terrorism law of extraordinary rendition which allows U.S. agents to transport suspected terrorists to off-shore sites where anti-torture laws do not apply).

Somehow each of the cast members, perhaps due to the number of major characters involved and thus the reduced screen time allowed for each, come across as superficial stereotypes - the distraught expectant mother, the ex-boyfriend who tries to help, the CIA agent with a conscience, the cold hearted CIA executive, the pragmatic senator, the torture victim, the secret police torturer, the torturer's daughter with a secret boyfriend, the boyfriend with a secret). You're not with any of the characters long enough to identify with them much and when it all gets tied up together in the end a bit too neatly you're just left feeling disappointed and cheated.

Early reviews seem to be mostly praising this but the friend whom I saw it with and another veteran TIFF goer that we see in various line-ups had the same sense of disappointment.

The film just seems too desperate to make it all relevant as it tries to inspire our shock at the wrongs being perpetrated in the name of the anti-terror wars but it mostly comes across as clichéd rather than natural. When the Gyllenhaal character finally builds up the will to act on his moral outrage you're just not convinced about how he's made this character arc as he has spent the first 3/4's of the film either stunned by the effects of a suicide bombing that takes place before his very eyes and then drinking himself into a stupor while occasionally taking time out for an illicit office romance or to bark an order to underlings. It seems Gyllenhaal is the protagonist we are meant to identify with but he is too weak-willed to inspire much audience sympathy. Witherspoon as the distraught expectant mother has more of an immediate draw on our heartstrings but doesn't kick off the expose on the U.S. side of the things which we are pulling for her to do by soliciting help from ex-boyfriend Sarsgaard (who works for Arkin's senator character) after her Egyptian-American husband goes mysteriously missing after a trans-Atlantic flight. There are at least a few moments of fireworks when Witherspoon at least briefly gets to confront the CIA exec played by Streep who is pulling the forced extradition strings behind the scenes, but a few seconds of confrontation doesn't make up for the 90 minutes of gradually increasing tedium that it takes to get there and we still have about 30 minutes to go in the plot after that highpoint. The subplot built around the head police torturer and his family in an un-named North African country is more engrossing and a neat twist is pulled off in that storyline but that wasn't enough to save the picture for us.

I had really been looking forward to this film but something just seemed to be missing in the way it pays off the different plot lines.