Movie Review Rendition

Rendition (2007)

Directed by Gavin Hood

Written by Kelly Sane 

Starring Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep, Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgard, Alan Arkin

Release Date October 19th, 2007

Published October 18th, 2007 

Those who advocate intelligence gathering techniques that extend beyond our constitution have a compelling argument. They cite intelligence gathered by extraordinary measures that have saved lives and how men who are truly bad guys have received the treatment they deserve for the things they did. This argument holds sway until you hear from Arizona Senator John McCain, a real life torture victim.

Senator McCain, a right wing, pro-war hawk opposes any action that associates America and torture. McCain's point is that torture simply doesn't work. That a tortured man will tell you anything you want to hear. The movie Rendition makes McCain's point in dramatic fashion as it tells the interlocking story of how torture effects the lives of so many different people in so many different ways.

Jake Gyllenhaal stars in Rendition as Douglas Freeman a CIA pencil pusher who finds himself thrust into the job of case worker in northern Africa following a terrorist attack. His new job will be to observe the tactics of a man named Abasi Fawal (Yigal Naor), tactics that are considered torture under American law. It will be Abasi who will attempt to glean information from the latest subject of what American law refers to as Extraordinary Rendition.

On his way home from a business trip in South Africa, Anwar Al Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally) is detained by police and then the CIA. It seems that he has received calls on numerous occasions from a terrorist named Rashid, calls he claims to be unaware of. Al Ibrahimi was returning home to Chicago where his very pregnant wife Isabella (Reese Witherspoon) and his six year old, American born son are waiting for him.

When he doesn't return and somehow disappears from the flight log, Isabella travels to Washington where an ex-boyfriend, Alan (Peter Sarsgard) works for a Senator (Alan Arkin). Using his connections, Alan finds out as much as he can about Anwar's disappearance. The trail leads all the way to the head of the CI, Corinne Whitman (Meryl Streep).

Those are the main players in Rendition and their relative positions. Where director Gavin Hood moves them from there is quite compelling and heart rending. Running parallel to this main story is the modest love story of Khalid (Moa Khouas) and Fatima (Zineb Oukach), the daughter of Abasi Fawal, the lead torture expert.

The melding of these two stories is where Rendition struggles and becomes sluggish and where director Gavin Hood employs a narrative trick that will irritate many in the audience as much as it did me. There is a moment, and I won't go into detail, late in the film where the timeline shifts and what we get is a scene that lets the air out of what was an electrically charged and tense series of scenes.

From this point on the films dueling stories become fractured and I was left struggling to connect these stories at all beyond the most tenuous of bonds.

A man, if tortured long enough, will tell you anything you want to hear. Whether what he says is true or not, doesn't matter to the torturers whose reward is for information. The truth is someone else's business. Rendition is extraordinarily powerful in bringing home the same message that Senator John McCain has always talked of, how torture simply doesn't work. Indeed, as the film states plainly, if you torture one man you create ten more who will rise up to fight back to protect them, or rescue them.

According to the Bush administration, Americans don't torture. No, we don't. By laws installed during the Clinton Administration, we hire less reputable countries to torture on our behalf. Ah, but Rendition doesn't let us off so easily that a liberal like myself can be satisfied with the answer that our policy of rendition is simply wrong. The lead torture expert in the film is portrayed as a good man who loves his family and believes he is doing the right thing.

Meryl Streep's CIA agent may be cold hearted and portrayed as something of a monster but her point about the lives she believes have been saved by information gathered through extraordinary rendition is powerful and logical. With the blinding certainty of a zealot, not unlike a certain President of the United States, she sees only the possibilities of this practice, not the collateral damage to our national conscience.

The love story between Khalid and Fatima is used to illustrate what some experts would call blowback. Militarized by the torture death of his brother, Khalid is enticed to become a suicide bomber. Fatima becomes his reason to live and there is a good deal of emotion invested in this subplot. It might have been more powerful without director Gavin Hood's narrative cheat late in the film that sucks all of the suspense out of the movie.

Yet another film in this early Oscar season, like The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, like Michael Clayton, Across The Universe or Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Rendition is a film with Oscar pretensions that falls just short of expectations. A grand cast of Oscar nominees and winners, compel us from beginning to end but narrative trickery and a strung together plot; let the air out of what should have been a potboiler of real emotion and suspense.