Rendition | Omar Metwally, Reese Witherspoon

Rendition | Omar Metwally, Reese Witherspoon | Liberal agenda? You bet your sweet patootie.

DVDs:

Rendition

	Rendition Omar Metwally, Reese Witherspoon New Line Home Video, 2008 average customer review:based on 72 reviews view larger image
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even better than Elah

After all the hype about its poor box office receipts, I was wary about a serious political film starring LEGALLY BLONDE's Reese Witherspoon, or another sensationalist "rendition" of what American movies make of torture.

But the script is particularly intricate and intelligent, with a wonderful twist. Sorry it didn't catch fire for the amazon reviewer, but the restraint with which this film treats the subject is responsible and works well.

Especially since--despite the director's political position--the script does harken back to the early years of LAW AND ORDER, when the strongest arguments of all sides of an issue were voiced.

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Liberal agenda? You bet your sweet patootie.

I'm not sure if it was intentional, but on my copy, bought in Hong Kong, there were Chinese subtitles for the subplot, which was spoken in Arabic (or, perhaps, another Middle Eastern language), but no English subtitles.

It is then perhaps an accidental tribute to the filmmakers that the film still works. It makes the film more global and decenters the American viewer: yes, after September 11, Americans have to give up control of knowledge: yes, there are other people, and no, the narcissism must have a stop.

As to a "liberal agenda". It happened to be on the agenda at Runnymede, it was in fact on the Barons' liberal agenda when they forced King John to sign Magna Carta, and the ability to override habeus corpus is not a fit subject for debate in a society claiming to be democratic.

Conservatives like duh-bate, and putting everything up for grabs. But guess what: IF you can be imprisoned arbitrarily and for an arbitrary length of time, then you cannot participate in a duh-bate. As Habermas has shown, the very possibility of debate (whether informed or one of those conservative, phoney duh-bates) is preconditioned on rights.

The "agenda" of rendition is to get us to identify, just enough, with a man who's taken away and locked up without rights.

Well, I'll be dipped. The film has an agenda. So did Indiana Jones (western hegemony, with a stupid grin).

Incommunicado. It's a weird feeling. I was tossed by mistake into the adult lockup at Chicago police HQ at the age of 15 for participating in a civil rights demonstration.

So when am I getting out of here? Do I get a baloney sandwich? Where's Mom?

I was guilty as charged and they let me go. Now, suppose you're not guilty.

Feels bad, doesn't it, and in a way that has a social dimension. It makes you reconsider your relations with your fellows in a deep way and say, this should never happen.

"Zero tolerance" in domestic American law is basically the idea that in order to prevent drug and sex crimes, it is better to be safe than sorry, and lock up people for sentences, sometimes for victimless crimes, and sometimes when they are innocent. The punishment of a purely innocent person is considered to be a cost factor.

It's an interesting cost, since we don't pay it, the victim pays the cost and is never recompensed, whether he's someone locked up mistakenly in a domestic prison, or someone who is "rendered".

In a dark-star turn, Meryl Streep argues for extraordinary rendition. She claims that it prevented a London incident.

This makes no sense. If you detain the wrong guy, you haven't prevented anything and are wasting scarce cop resources (including baloney sandwiches).

If you have whom you think is the right guy, what's wrong with waking up a judge? The argument here is the need for secrecy; you don't want the bad guys to know you've nailed one of them.

This manages to significantly exagerrate the value of police and military intelligence. In his book on military intelligence, John Keegan, the British military writer, shows that it is almost never critical to war-winning, and in the case of the "war on terror", your adversaries will rarely profit from knowing which of their real operatives you've taken down.

The "war on terror" will be won when the United States stops sponsoring almost every decision made by the Israelis, and stops using military force to try to obtain oil reserves. It would be better fought in the open by a USA that simply refuses to stop being a country ruled by laws.

Do we become a Fascist society if one person is denied habeus corpus? Isn't this a Godwin convergence, similar to the way that internet conversations converge towards comparisions to Hitler? Is it some sort of bad behavior to get rowdy, and start calling people and societies Fascist when someone we don't even know is violated?

I think we do. Recently, Tim Berners-Lee has warned people that they are leaving too much information about themselves on the Internet. It didn't occur to him to question why we should worry. One of the reasons given was that marketers would know too much about us.

But what was interesting is that Berners-Lee assumes as given a need for anonymity.

What are we all scared of? Being a victim, whether of job loss or extraordinary rendition?

Why do we have to go on like this?

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excellent movie

This is an excellent movie for 2007 films. And I kept wondering why it wasn't even mentioned during the Academy Awards. Roger Ebert gave it full four stars. This movie is excellent in that it is relevent to today's issue about torture, terrorism, and covert agencies, with wonderful actors all around, and good directing. Very good thriller, with intelligence.

More a message than a movie

Back in the 1960's, people used to protest the Vietnam war by either staging rallies, demonstrations and the likes or, if you could play an instrument, sing a song. Nowadays, the in-thing to do apparently is singing songs and making movies. And ultimately, that's what these films come across as: excuses to rant and make speeches against the evils of whatever the film's subject is about. "Rendition", a story centering around a controversial government policy, is that kind of film that doesn't really mind whether you like the film; just as long as it tells you awful and terrible certain things are.

Egyptian-born Anwar El-Abrahimi is on his way back to the United States after a trip to see his pregnant wife Isabella and son. But information comes to light that he may have had a conversation with terrorist Rashid Salimi so the US deports him to be "interrogated" for information, with brutal questioning methods. Anaylist Douglas Freeman is hired to watch the questioning while the leader, Abasi Fawal, has been the target of assassination attempts with his daughter Fatima perhaps involved somehow. That's not even scratching the surface as we see Isabella asking an old friend/flame Alan Smith for help who has connections to a senator as well as Corinne Whitman, the woman who initially requested the interrogation.

Thanks to Paul Haggis (who directed the similarily heavyhanded "In the Valley of Elah" and the abysmal "Crash), I grouped characters in films like this a "plot puppet", characters whose sole existence is to stand on whatever side of a subject yet have no real emotional connection to the audience. Sure the actors, namely Meryl Streep and Jake Gyllenhaal, do solid work but they never feel like fully formed characters and just do variations of their central political stance: Streep wants information no matter how, Witherspoon cries and wants her husband back and Gyllenhaal is conflicted about what he's doing. You can praise the acting sure but can't really praise the character itself.

The film however does argue a strong point although anyone with common sense will tell you the message before the film even says it. Practices like "extraordinary rendition" are inhumane and brutal and has far-reaching consequences for those it touches is kind of obvious. It's like a war movie saying "war is hell because we kill people" or an ad saying "smoking causes cancer". However, the film did at least bring the attention of the policy in the open and some, like myself who never even heard of it, are now aware of it and can offer opinions to it.

If you can get past the rather implausible character connections (watch this: daughter of official is dating guy who wants to kill official who is interrogating a possible terrorist with US employee who is in talks with US senator who started interrogation who meets possible terrorist's husband), it's an alright film but as to what the film wants to be, well it's not here. It's more like a protest speech morphed into a movie.

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