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Harvey Karten's Reviews

Review: Redacted

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#1 of 1 Posted 10/24/07 10:47 PM

From harveykarten Posts 798 Last Feb-7
To All [Msg # 22712.1 ]

REDACTED

Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey S. Karten
Magnolia Pictures
Grade: B+
Directed by:    Brian De Palma
Written By: Brian De Palma
Cast: Patrick Carroll, Rob Devaney, Izzy Diaz, Mike Figueroa, Ty Jones, Kel O'Neill, Daniel Stewart
Screened at: Dolby 24, NYC, 10/24/07
Opens: November 16, 2007

Brian De Palma’s intensely political picture gets its title from a word meaning “edited,” in the sense that much of the truth about America’s war in Iraq has been blacked act and not available to the general American public. From the central event in “Redacted,” one can see why. While the movie is fiction, it is based on an actual event that occurred in March 2006 when a few American soldiers stationed in the village of Mahmoudiya south of Baghdad in what they call “that godforsaken country” raped a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, then murdered her and her family and set the building on fire. The action is supposedly to avenge the killing of a hard-nosed master sergeant who is blown up when he approaches booby-trapped, junked furniture. In actuality, at least as De Palma sees the event, it was an expression of contempt led by a dumb, racist soldier who had threatened to gut the few who knew in advance about the plan should any decide to tell the authorities or try to stop him.

De Palma used a variety of cinematic techniques to give the film the appearance of docudrama, including pages of printed material with several apparently controversial words blacked out, or censored, changing scenes with the Brechtian device of naming each as a chapter in a sad story. The film opens on a sympathetic, friendly fellow who is in no way a stereotypical army grunt. Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) uses his video camera to record events inside the American compound entitled “Tell Me No Lies,” with the hope of using the pictures to admit him into film school. He hones in on a variety of soldiers, most of whom have no wish to become career army men. They include compulsive reader Gabe Blix (Kel O’Neill), jokingly introduced to Salazar’s camera as Mr. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”   Further, McCoy (Rob Devaney), is a lawyer who probably does more thinking about the morality of the law than his buddies, while by contrast, B.B. Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman) and Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll), are the bottom of the barrel, frequently calling the Arabs “towel-heads,” “hajis,” and “midget Ali-Babas.” The one career officer, Sgt James Sweet (Ty Jones), provides much of the film’s early humor in the ways that he teasingly describes the men.

When a car carrying a pregnant woman speeding to a hospital refuses to stop at the checkpoint, the soldiers fire upon it killing the woman and her unborn baby, providing yet another case of how Americans are failing to win the hearts and minds of the local people. A French journalist conducts nterviews in her language (with English subtitles provided), while porentous, 17th-century style music hypes the actions as photographed in Jordan by Jonathon Cliff. Throughout the drama, the men speak in loud, crisp voices, as though performing Aaron Sorkin’s “A Few Good Men” on the Music Box stage in New York–a play about the court-martial of Marines accused of murder. The volume of the banter evokes the raw power of the mostly macho outfit manning a checkpoint, subjecting Arab drivers to humiliations by searching their cars and manhandling the passengers.

The subject matter will be new except to those who have seen Brian De Palma 1989 movie, “Casualties of War,” situated during the Vietnam war, when a girl is taken from her village by five American soldiers. Four of the soldiers rape her, but the fifth refuses. The young girl is killed. The fifth soldier is determined that justice will be done. Like that previous work, this film is about the realities of war, yet there is little doubt that De Palma stands on the left politically. In the production notes he states, “Once again a senseless war has produced a senseless tragedy.” Those unfamiliar with one of the principal criticisms of the war–that the administration lied in saying that weapons of mass destruction are located in Iraq and must be searched out and destroyed–will still catch the director’s drift. War is hell, but an unnecessary war fought for the wrong reasons in which most of the foreign country’s inhabitants consider Americans to be hateful occupiers, is the seventh layer of hell.

For the true story of the rape and murders go to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abeer_Qassim_Hamza_murder

Rated R.    91 minutes   © 2007 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

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Harvey Karten's Reviews

Review: Redacted

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