Rendition

"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.

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.

Rendition fails to really nail the issue - it chooses instead to show its colours too distinctly.

And what we get instead is a decent political thriller, but one that is difficult to assess in terms of its attempted aim - after all, here we are dealing with what must be one of the emotive issues known to man - can torture ever be justified? Is the utilitarian rule of the possible gains worth the literal breaking of a possibly innocent man? Is he a terrorist, isn't he a terrorist?

This is a very important topic, and a very complex one, that is treated as though it were a film about lobbying on the one hand, showing Washington and the Beltway as a ground for piranhas to make or break their careers, and on the other, in Egypt, a battle for the sanity of all involved there.

Yes, it makes a good thriller; but, and it's a big but, it lacks the true depth of thought, rather than action, that will address the issue, rather than (God forbid) entertain an audience.

Excellent performances from all involved - really. Good steady hand at the helm - but what it lacks is complexity - it seems complex initially but unravels the further down the rabbit warren we go.

I came away uneasy, but not as uneasy as I should have, and non-plussed by the sleight of hand tricks that should have revealed real ambivalence, real moral dilemma, real grey areas, whereras instead I was left with black and white.

Not the film it wants to be, it is a good political thriller, but it is not as effective a piece of cinema as it could have been.

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.

I saw the movie yesterday and was shocked by it, but even more shocked by some of the comments I have read here. One person wrote that it was ambiguous if the victim of the torture was guilty or not--therefore... One person wrote that since he wasn't an American citizen, therefore... Some people comment that the people in the Middle East hate us and want us dead, therefore... So are we saying then that it is right to torture someone who is guilty of a crime? Are we saying it is right to torture someone who is not an American Citizen? Are we saying that it is right to torture someone who may hate us and want us dead? Are we saying that, as is written in the Geneva Convention, the Declaration of Human Rights and the Constitution of the United States that "torture is wrong, but some torture is less wrong than others?" When does it become "right" to torture? THAT is why this movie is powerful-- it is ambiguous, but not about torture. Torture is always wrong, and if we are willing to do it, even in the name of justice and "National Security" or "freedom and democracy" then we are wrong and we are evil; we are doing exactly what we are accusing our enemies of doing (and we are calling them "wrong" in the same breath.) My favorite line in the film was "if you don't want to compromise join Amnesty International." Right on.