GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 11/15/07)

Brian De Palma's Redacted was so thoroughly debated during its tour of the fall film-festival circuit that its theatrical release seems a bit of an anticlimax. (Given the way Iraq-themed pictures have been playing at the box office, distributor Magnolia likely has at least one more anticlimax in store.) While in some respects this multi-point-of-view chronicle of a war crime and its burial is formally ingenious, that ingenuity is mostly conceptual, which is to say it doesn't actually play. Those expecting the picture to say something new and/or incendiary about the current state of affairs in Iraq are likely to be disappointed regardless of what side of the political debate over the war they're on. Indeed, one fellow viewer observed in a conversation that the film finally comes down on the side of Donald Rumsfeld, when the former Secretary of Defense looked at Abu Ghraib and concluded it was the work of a "few bad apples." De Palma's story isn't so much concerned with specifics of American policy in Iraq as dictated by suits as it is in making a more general "war is hell" statement. In which case, a would-be moviegoer might be better off staying home with a DVD of All Quiet on the Western Front.

This "fictional story inspired by true events" is written, as it were, by a variety of different cameras. First, there's the "video diary" of Angel Salazar, a soldier who hopes his work will land him in film school. There's an impossibly pretentious French documentary — "un film de Marc et Francois Clement" — about the U.S. soldiers running a Samarra checkpoint. There are "reports" from "ATV News," an Al-Jazeera-esque outfit, and "Central Euro News." There's base security camera footage, various website videos, and more. These can't be assembled "seamlessly" — that's just the point — but De Palma still creates a strong narrative thread via these disparate simulated "sources" in a tight 90 minutes. This story concerns some U.S. soldiers — in particular, two very bad apples — who rape and murder a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and kill much of her family as well. While it can hardly be said that De Palma paints a rosy picture of the American military — does De Palma ever paint a rosy picture of anything? — Redacted is not so much an exercise in "blame America first" troop-bashing as it is (for what it's worth) the study of a potentially never-ending, destructive chain of recrimination. The rape is at least partially motivated by an IED that kills the platoon's staff sergeant; the response to the rape is the beheading of an American soldier; back in the States, an anti-war activist makes a vlog calling for the gruesome torture and execution of U.S. troops; and so on, and so on, and so on.

The problem here, which vitiates the picture's ingenuity and causes it, finally, to sink like a stone, is in the physical execution of the material. Salazar's video diary, even with its relentlessly cheesy in-camera transitions, is too slick, and some of the news reports play like flat SNL skits. In the meantime, the fake French doc is spot on and largely hilarious (although it contains within it the film's most suspenseful scene, a predictably botched checkpoint standoff), and the web videos convince as well. The surveillance camera videos, on the other hand, are awful, not just for how they look but for what's enacted beneath them — exposition and action so amateurishly on-the-money that it would get laughed off of a high-school stage. And while it's obvious that De Palma needed to cast largely unknown actors for this piece, you'd think he would have taken the time to bring on a few capable ones (for one thing, they might have sold some of De Palma's frequently ham-handed writing a little better). One particularly egregious turn is by Daniel Stewart Sherman, as one of the soldier rapists; generating zero genuine menace, he comes on like Chris Farley (speaking of SNL) parodying a "heavy" dramatic turn. It's bad stuff, and no amount of backpedaling grounded in Brechtian theory can make it less bad.

— Glenn Kenny