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REDACTED Send This Review to a Friend
The Iraq War is yielding impulses on behalf of serious filmmakers to expose the horrors of that misbegotten adventure and various occurrences stemming from it. Veteran writer-director Brian De Palma has performed a major service with his explosive, disturbing film “Redacted,” which was shown at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival and then at the New York Film Festival.
De Palma’s method is creating a make-believe documentary with the use of high definition and assorted elements of the communications field these days, including television, cable and the internet, to get his story across. The film is fiction based on a real life atrocity, the rape and murder of a young girl and the killing of her family.
De Palma creates a convincingly realistic work in which an assortment of actors make us believe they are really soldiers. We get their statements, see them coping with the dangers faced daily, the ennui of patrol duty and not knowing what lurks, as when a leader in the unit is blown up by a planted bomb. We see them in their recreation mode when their various attitudes are revealed.
Language difficulties between occupiers and the occupied are captured, as when people in a car are shot at and slaughtered because apparently they thought they were being waved through a checkpoint instead of being signaled to stop.
It is in the context of the brutalizing nature of the misbegotten war that a few troops decide to go on a revenge binge and invade a house and rape a young girl they have seen passing through the checkpoints. One soldier with a conscience tries to stop them, but he is no match for their warped determination, and trying to blow the whistle will only get him in trouble.
Some may see the incident as soiling the reputation of our troops as a whole, but the filmmaker makes his distinctions, as well as places the perpetrators in the right context. Controversy has erupted by the decision of the film’s distributor to black out the faces in a montage of bloody and mangled bodies shown at the end of the film to illustrate the toll the war as taken on Iraq. Thus “Redacted” has itself been redacted. The distributor claims it is a legal problem. De Palma resents his film being tampered with and says he has offered to indemnify the distributor for any legal losses.
The film is powerful without the disputed scenes, but their inclusion does put a dramatic face on the horror inflicted, even with the blacked out faces, and helps bring it home to us in an atmosphere where the full picture of what is going on in Iraq has been redacted by the administration in its efforts to sell the war to a public that increasingly wants to exit.
The film is technically brilliant in making everything look so real, but even more important, it is a bold attempt to ignite more protest on behalf of the public and De Palma deserves credit for his stand, as well as for the skill with which he has made this film, one that certainly deserves a wide viewing. A Magnolia Pictures release.
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