Timely art about the Iraq War seems so crucial to a sense of
cultural equilibrium, and Redacted is at some levels such an impressive reboot
of Brian De Palma’s career, that part of me wants to figure out reasons to
shower it with praise. Unfortunately, while Redacted, a verité-style drama
about a group of American soldiers manning a checkpoint in
things, it’s dramatically inert. It’s inspired, De Palma says, by a real event
involving the rape of a 14-year-old girl and the slaughter of her and her
family. Maybe it’s no wonder that, confronting this kind of horror, De Palma
founders, scrambling not just to capture that kind of atrocity in his camera
viewfinder, but to do it in a way that makes any kind of sense.
De Palma has built a prestigious career that owes in large
part to what sometimes seems like an almost facile approach to atrocity. I’m
thinking of that brutal, horrifying (and on some level hilarious) murder
sequence in Body Double, but
there’s so much artfully executed atrocity in the De Palma filmography. Take
your pick. (I keep remembering a piece Harlan Ellison wrote describing a
screening during which he stood up and shouted something like, “I should have
known! Another sick De Palma movie!” as he made his way to the exit.) Don’t get
me wrong — I think De Palma’s best work is genius. It’s all well and good to
compose a suspenseful, aesthetically and sexually provocative murder sequence when
the impetus is fiction. But when the catalyst for that dark vision is recent
history — or, more properly, current events — how does an artist maintain the
same level of brio?
De Palma can’t. The rape sequence in Redacted is appalling
and unpleasant, of course. It’s also telegraphed far enough in advance that it
won’t catch anyone off guard, and De Palma refrains from juicing it up. It’s
interesting in the auteurist sense because De Palma has historically been so
unkind to so many of his characters, but what he does here is so different, and
so restrained — it’s like a composer who excels at crazy, Wagnerian opera suddenly
retreating into humble chamber music. De Palma, the master of the shameless
gotcha!, is suddenly dedicated to playing fair. And the soldiers in Redacted who
videotape a rape are doing what De Palma has so often been accused of — exploiting a
woman for (visual) pleasure. Does Redacted function as autocritique?
Redacted could be as powerful as it is punishing if De Palma
found a mode that he could excel in from start to finish. But he’s working well outside of his comfort zone. The film has
intriguing passages, including a faux French-language documentary about the
occupying American soldiers that’s inserted without explanation into the
narrative and a startlingly immediate look at what life might be like on the
job at one of those roadblock checkpoints we read so much about in the papers. I also liked
his incorporation of Internet-style video, including a surprisingly convincing
video-blog rant and a grisly beheading. (Never having watched a beheading video
to the end, I can only guess that De Palma’s team mimicked one effectively.)
But the footage of bull sessions and smack-talk between the soldiers has a
drama-class feel that undermines more than it convinces, and while it’s easy enough to
tell what De Palma’s going for intellectually and emotionally, it’s hard to say that I ever felt any of it in my gut.
atrocities at the very end of the film. (The tactic may have been borrowed from
Dogville.) They have been a source of controversy because they have actually
been redacted — the faces of the people depicted are partly obscured — against
De Palma’s wishes, ostensibly because of fears of legal action by the families
of those pictured. (It seems like an unlikely scenario, but who knows?
Lawyers.) Before seeing the film I imagined that would be a minor issue, but it
actually has a dramatic effect — the black bars over the eyes serve to further
dehumanize the people in the photos, as if they’re the sum of their sadly
decimated body parts, only worth depicting for a cinema audience inasmuch as
they’ve been maimed. The final photograph, representing the soldiers’ victim,
thus provides the film’s only true emotional jolt — after seeing so many black
holes in place of suffering human faces, mere eye contact is devastating. C
Directed by Brian De Palma
Edited by Bill Pankow
Cinematography by Jonathan Cliff
Production Design by Phillip Barker
Screened 10/29/07 at Dolby 24, New York, NY
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 (?)