Film

New York Film Festival: 'Redacted' Suffers From Bad Melodrama

By Daniel Montgomery

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Redacted will surely be accused of anti-American or anti-military biases, given its powder-keg subject matter — American soldiers rape and murder Iraqi civilians, inspired by a story reported in 2006. I don’t believe it is unpatriotic. It is, however, a very bad film. It is ugly, manipulative, and offensive, a failure for reasons that go far beyond the politics of its maker, writer/director Brian De Palma, for whom I felt great resentment after the film was over.

What I resent is De Palma’s execution. He operates with such a heavy hand that he renders the film useless as commentary, and not very good as melodrama either. He bludgeons the audience with paper-thin characterizations and overwrought performances. He wallows in crass sensationalism. He aims for truth, but misses by a mile; so many scenes play like excuses to ride his high horse atop a soap box, at the expense of his credibility.

And yet it starts with such promise! When it begins, we see the war through the lens of a soldier’s camera. Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) is recording his experiences in the hopes that the footage will get him into film school. In the first scene, he playfully interacts with the other members of his unit: bookish Blix (Kel O’Neill), who can usually be found reading; cocky McCoy (Rob Devaney); slow-witted Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman); and unhinged Flake (Patrick Carroll). This first scene indicates a tone of man-on-the-ground realism, but Salazar’s footage is only one of many points of view.

Next, we hear the narration of what seems to be a French reporter or documentarian. She discusses the traffic checkpoint manned by Salazar’s unit and the psychological pressure it exerts on the soldiers. The film shifts perspectives throughout, cycling through various forms of media — everything from embedded journalists to YouTube. The Iraq war is unique in that its stories can be told across platforms, but De Palma’s film doesn’t have much to say about the new multimedia dimension of war coverage, so the shifting of perspectives mostly functions as a storytelling device.

There’s one instance where the device works marvelously. On a terrorist website, we see a streaming video of a young man placing an object in a dump that the unit patrols. It’s an IED. The next morning, we’re back to Salazar’s perspective, through which we see the soldiers maneuver around the object oblivious of its presence, and we wait for the inevitable. In that scene, we’re given a gut-wrenching understanding of the life-and-death urgency of every moment in a soldier’s life.

But there comes a point where the film completely divorces itself from reality. Flake blithely suggests a gang rape in the home of a family they have recently raided. Blix and McCoy think he must be joking. Rush and Salazar are game, and this represents a peculiar shift in the Salazar character. The young man with dreams of film school is, out of the blue, willing to facilitate a vicious crime to get some nifty footage. It’s indicative of how little De Palma regards his characters. He’s not interested in who they are. He contrives their behavior in order to comment on it. It’s lazy storytelling, and it invalidates any message he might hope to convey.

But what is that message exactly? That war makes good men become depraved criminals? That depraved criminals find their way into the military? Or that old stand-by: War changes a man? I don’t think it’s possible to derive any meaning from this band of brothers. They can’t show us anything about the human condition, because they cease to be human beings — they’re all vulgar caricatures, subject to De Palma’s whims.

The Flake and Rush characters are especially unseemly. They become the kind of cartoonish villains who tie damsels to railroad tracks. There’s nothing interesting about them, no substance or dimension. In one ridiculous scene, Rush threatens a fellow soldier to keep his mouth shut by reminding him of the slogan, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” It would be comical if it weren’t so hideous.

The developments that follow — coverups! retaliation! — sink deeper and deeper into cheap theatrics and stupidity. The questioning of the soldiers involved in the incident. A callous video tribute to a fallen comrade. The way McCoy is made into a receptacle for bloated speeches about integrity and the cost of war. There’s a stench of smugness in the way De Palma floods our senses with cynicism and violence. He shocks us but doesn’t inform us or offer insight or ideas.

At the end there’s a montage of photos of real-life Iraqi civilians who have been victimized by the war. A film this exploitive has not earned the right to such images, and their use here feels like a violation of the audience’s emotions. The end credits run without music, and I note this to explain the piercing silence that pervaded the theater as the credits rolled. The silence continued when the lights went up and the audience made its solemn procession out of the theater. Perhaps some of them were in awe. Perhaps others were appalled, as I was.

Preceding Redacted is a terrific short film that also deals with the Iraq war. It’s called ‘Cherries’, and it’s directed by Tom Harper, who tells the story of an imagined time when the army is stretched so thin that military training becomes mandatory for British teens aged 16-18. In its subtler way, it is also a scary document of the cost of war; there is an evocative shot of an empty classroom where a teacher sits, appearing hopeless and defeated. It is more meaningful in its 15 minutes than Redacted is in 90.

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