Review of Rendition (2007) by R. Jeffrey D — 26 Mar 2009

New York born Omar Metwally plays the part of an Egyptian engineer, living and working in the USA for twenty years, with a child and a heavily-pregnant American wife. He is snatched by the CIA and whisked away to be tortured in a foreign land. His crime? Suspicion that he may have been contacted by a terrorist. Where has he gone? His wife searches for him. In the foreign land, meanwhile, the chief torturer is searching for his runaway daughter. And a CIA bureaucrat is about to learn a few lessons in morality.

Suspicion, of course, is not equitable to guilt and, in a democratic society, any suspicion of involvement in a criminal offence should be subject to impartial investigation and to court proceedings, if necessary. We've seen enough abuses and miscarriages of justice in Britain in the name of the war on terrorism to know that 'suspicion' often amounts to conviction in the minds of police and security forces; 'impartial investigation' is probably a contradiction in terms - once the investigators have their suspicions they will not look for contrary evidence, they will make evidence fit, they will manufacture evidence if need be. So the right to open arrest and trial is no guarantee that the innocent will remain free. It is a better option, however, than simply snatching people and seeking conviction via water torture, beatings, and electricity.

The film also questions the quality of information obtained under torture. People will say anything to make the pain and terror stop. They will come out with false allegations about others, they will pick up cues from the police and interrogators and appear to corroborate the suspicions of those doing the torturing. In social work and psychoanalysis, people frequently come out with extraordinary tales: responding to questioning by friendly, kindly therapists, they produce fantastic stories about abuse, alien abduction, previous lives - given a couple of weeks of friendly interviews, a therapist can convince a patient that s/he is either the angel of god or a disciple of the devil. Under torture, the victim has an even greater incentive to fabricate, to invent, to collude with the torturers' in naming names and confirming data. Torture does not work.

This is the political point of the film. The USA is engaged in a widespread abuse of democracy, law, and due process, abuses which it cannot justify morally, legally, or in practical terms. It is using torture, it is ignoring human rights upheld by its constitution, and it is doing so because it has the power to do so, not because it has the right to do so.

And abuses are carried out by nameless bureaucrats, by apparently decent people who simply do their job and carry out orders. They are not ogres, they are not monsters; for tyranny to exist all that is required is that decent people maintain their silence.

So, full marks to the film makers - they have refused to maintain their silence. But have they made a good film? No. There are four strands to the film - the abducted man and his wife's search for information about him, the chief torturer's tale (where we see a decent, loving family man being torn apart by concerns about his missing daughter), the bureaucrats' tale with its silences and denials, and the CIA man's story (which is, frankly, ludicrous).

Of the four strands, one works; the tale of the missing daughter is beautifully interwoven. The abducted Egyptian is too innocent - he is all-American, his lovely wife knows people in Washington, she can begin her search at the top, nobody in their right mind would suspect him of anything evil, other than perhaps voting Republican; I suppose it makes the point that nobody is safe ... but. And, while Glen Close serves up a beautiful cameo role as the woman who authorises rendition, the role of Jake Gyllenhaal is sheer nonsense (nothing wrong with his acting and it's not his fault, it's the script). The film is too clean-cut, too nice.

So full marks to the film makers for deciding they had to protest, had to make a statement about the evils being done in the name of democracy, and full marks to an excellent cast and production crew who save the script from sinking into oblivion. The father/daughter sub-plot - superb performances from Zineb Oukach as daughter and Yigal Naor as father - raises the film above the ordinary. If the rest of the script had paralleled the quality of their storyline, it would have been a superb film.

It should have been above the ordinary ... you can't help wondering how much it was watered down, how much the money backers called the shots and suggested "we can't be too anti-American, people won't watch it". Well, if you call yourself a democracy, you have to be prepared to stand up for truth. I watched John Pilger's "The War on Democracy" immediately after this movie - I'd seriously suggest you do the same (you can Google it, it's available online). The documentary is making something of an impact of late, and politically provocative films are emerging from the States - well, it's time the legacy of McCarthy and the political sterility of Hollywood was challenged. It's a laudable film, but, no disrespect to an excellent international cast, it rarely gets above the ordinary, and the ending is a huge disappointment.