Given the tenor of political discussion these days, it is inevitable that someone with a loud voice and a small mind will label Rendition anti-American. (But look! A quick Internet search reveals that some people already have, many of them without even bothering to see the movie.) It is, after all, much easier to rant and rave about treacherous Hollywood liberals than to think through the moral and strategic questions raised by some of the policies of the US government. But it is just these questions that Rendition tries to address, in a manner that, while hardly neutral - it may not shock you to learn that the filmmakers come out against torture, kidnapping and other abuses - nonetheless tries to be evenhanded and thoughtful.
Everyone in the movie, that is, receives a sympathetic hearing. The North African police chief who supervises the beating and water-boarding of an innocent prisoner, the American intelligence official who puts the prisoner into the torturer's hands, the senator who hesitates to intervene. They may be villains, but they see their actions as justified, something they have in common with the conscience-stricken CIA analyst and the reluctant jihadist who are their adversaries.
Rendition may be earnest, but it is hardly naive. Rather, it tries to be thoughtful and respectful of complexity while at the same time honoring the imperatives of commercial entertainment. It has timely issues and serious ambitions, and it also has movie stars - Reese Witherspoon with a huge pregnant belly, Meryl Streep with a Southern accent, Jake Gyllenhaal with sad, sleepy eyes - as well as young romance, breathless chases and violent explosions. Honestly, what could be more American than that? (Now might be the time to note that the director, Gavin Hood, is from South Africa. His last film, Tsotsi, won the Oscar in 2006 for best foreign-language film. The screenwriter here is Kelley Sane.)
PHOTO: COURTESY OF VIE VISION PICTURES
So Rendition is a well-meaning, honorable movie. Which is not to say that it is a very good one. It suffers especially from a familiar kind of narrative overcrowding. Sane and Hood frantically weave together plot strands in an effort to visit as many ideological, religious and emotional battlegrounds as they can, and the result is a degree of combat fatigue, as well as information overload. The filmmakers obey the current rule in Hollywood that states that a picture with large themes and a one-word title must also have multiple, chronologically de-centered story lines. (For your consideration: Crash, Syriana and Babel.) But they don't handle the complications very well, and try to pull off a third-act surprise that is less a plot twist than a logical unraveling. You may spend the last 15 minutes rubbing your eyes and scratching your head in puzzlement rather than fighting back tears.
But up until that point, each story, taken on its own, yields some touching moments and canny insights. At the center of the hubbub is Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally, who stole a scene in Munich), an Egyptian-born engineer who has lived in the US for his entire adult life. On his way home to Chicago from Cape Town, Anwar is snatched at the airport in Washington and "rendered" into the brutal penal system of an unspecified North African country where a suicide bombing has recently killed, among others, a CIA operative. Back home Anwar's American wife, Isabella (Witherspoon), unable to find out what has happened to him, tries to work her only government connection, an old boyfriend, Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard), who now works on the staff of one Senator Hawkins (Alan Arkin).
Meanwhile, back in North Africa, the police chief, Abasi Fawal (Igal Naor), when he isn't torturing Anwar in a dank, shadowy dungeon, is worrying about his oldest daughter, Fatima (Zineb Oukach). She has been hanging around with Khalid (Moa Khouas), a poor, soulful artist with a sad smile, a motorbike and connections to the terrorists. And Douglas Freeman (Gyllenhaal), a CIA analyst whose Bogart- (or perhaps Clooney-) esque dissolution was interrupted by the bombing, begins to have second thoughts about what Fawal is doing.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF VIE VISION PICTURES
Freeman and Fawal conduct an argument about ends and means that is mirrored by the debate between Smith and Corrinne Whitman (Streep), who runs the rendition program with unflappable conviction. The tussle in Washington is more pointed and emphatic - "Americans don't torture," Streep hisses, while Sarsgaard hisses back about due process and the rule of law - but the one in North Africa has a more pungent atmosphere and juicier acting.
Naor, with his shiny head and bushy eyebrows, is as emphatic in his gestures and expressions as an actor in a silent movie, with a gruff, rolling baritone that makes you glad that Rendition isn't one. Gyllenhaal, for his part, tries his hand at minimalism, conveying his character's ethical quandary by moping and mumbling. The two of them are an oddly captivating team.
For her part, Witherspoon retains her stunned, steely resolve until the script calls upon her to start screaming, while Streep savors another chance to embody the chilly self-confidence of power. Oukach and Khouas, as the young, star-crossed lovers, have little to do but regard each other with wounded, wide-eyed longing; this is not a movie with much need for ingenues.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF VIE VISION PICTURES
And yes, it could have used more subtlety, a lighter touch, a more disciplined narrative. But all its clumsy efforts are toward an honest and difficult goal, which is to use the resources of mainstream moviemaking to get viewers thinking about a moral crisis that many of us would prefer to ignore. Of course it's disappointing when such efforts don't succeed, but I wouldn't want to live in a country where filmmakers never tried.
China has begun recruiting for a planetary defense force after risk assessments determined that an asteroid could conceivably hit Earth in 2032. Job ads posted online by China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) this week, sought young loyal graduates focused on aerospace engineering, international cooperation and asteroid detection. The recruitment drive comes amid increasing focus on an asteroid with a low — but growing — likelihood of hitting earth in seven years. The 2024 YR4 asteroid is at the top of the European and US space agencies’ risk lists, and last week analysts increased their probability
On a misty evening in August 1990, two men hiking on the moors surrounding Calvine, a pretty hamlet in Perth and Kinross, claimed to have seen a giant diamond-shaped aircraft flying above them. It apparently had no clear means of propulsion and left no smoke plume; it was silent and static, as if frozen in time. Terrified, they hit the ground and scrambled for cover behind a tree. Then a Harrier fighter jet roared into view, circling the diamond as if sizing it up for a scuffle. One of the men snapped a series of photographs just before the bizarre
Feb. 17 to Feb. 23 “Japanese city is bombed,” screamed the banner in bold capital letters spanning the front page of the US daily New Castle News on Feb. 24, 1938. This was big news across the globe, as Japan had not been bombarded since Western forces attacked Shimonoseki in 1864. “Numerous Japanese citizens were killed and injured today when eight Chinese planes bombed Taihoku, capital of Formosa, and other nearby cities in the first Chinese air raid anywhere in the Japanese empire,” the subhead clarified. The target was the Matsuyama Airfield (today’s Songshan Airport in Taipei), which
Power struggles are never pretty. Fortunately, Taiwan is a democracy so there is no blood in the streets, but there are volunteers collecting signatures to recall nearly half of the legislature. With the exceptions of the “September Strife” in 2013 and the Sunflower movement occupation of the Legislative Yuan and the aftermath in 2014, for 16 years the legislative and executive branches of government were relatively at peace because the ruling party also controlled the legislature. Now they are at war. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) holds the presidency and the Executive Yuan and the pan-blue coalition led by the