"Redacted"

Of all the Iraq-war-themed movies released this fall, this passionate, personal film stands apart, and it stands alone.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Iraq War

Photo: Magnolia Pictures

Mike Figueroa in"Redacted."

Nov. 16, 2007 | Late in the summer, editors at all sorts of publications (this one included) were looking ahead to the fall's releases and taking note of the numerous fictional movies that were either about the Iraq war specifically, or about the United States' tangled, contentious involvement in the Middle East in general. Week by week those movies -- "In the Valley of Elah," "Rendition," "The Kingdom," "Lions for Lambs" -- some of them lousy and some of them at least honorable and thoughtful, have come and gone. These days all movies are disposable -- even a heavily hyped blockbuster like "American Gangster" has a short shelf life. But the Iraq war movies of this recent autumn have churned through theaters so quickly they've barely left a footprint. As my colleague Andrew O'Hehir has noted, no one wants to see these pictures. When I talk to my friends about it, it's clear they're staying away not out of apathy but out of helplessness and fatigue. At this point, can any movie about Iraq make us think or feel any differently?

Despite -- or perhaps because of -- everything that's already been written about it, not many people will likely want to see Brian De Palma's "Redacted," either. But of all the war-themed pictures that have been released so far this fall, it stands apart, and it stands alone: "Redacted" is confrontational, rough, immediate and confounding. In places, it's nearly impossible to watch, or perhaps it just seems like too much for any filmmaker to ask us to watch. But I've seen no other picture like it, certainly not this fall and perhaps ever. "Redacted" is a fictional story based on real events -- most significantly the rape and murder of 14-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi, in Mahmudiya, Iraq, in March 2006 by American troops -- and it's a blunt, flawed picture, flagrant in the way it defies the degree of finesse and meticulous emotional orchestration we expect in a movie. But the nakedness of its anger, of De Palma's anger, is its very strength. Debating its numerous problems -- the weakness of some of the acting (De Palma uses a group of relatively unknown actors here), or the effusiveness of the music over the final, devastating set of images -- is like critiquing an open sore. This is one of those rare pictures that's more significant for what it asks of us than for what it is.

De Palma found all the material for "Redacted" -- its title a reference to the act of alteration, of editing or removing sensitive or confidential information -- by digging around on the Internet: He collected the pieces of his story from news reports, from pictures, videos and journal entries made by soldiers, from snuff videos posted on Islamic fundamentalist Web sites. From the Web he also collected photographs of Iraq war victims -- many of them children -- that would never show up in the mainstream press: These are the pictures that close the movie, a set of images of the wounded and the dead that will linger with you -- as they did with me -- long after you've left the theater. I doubt I'll ever forget them. (The eyes of these people have been blacked out. Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures, the studio behind "Redacted," has claimed the alterations were necessary for legal reasons, because the subjects had not signed releases. De Palma has decried the alteration of the pictures in interviews and at the movie's New York Film Festival press conference in October. As he has said, his movie is itself redacted.)

"Redacted" consists largely of re-creations of the images, videos, testimonies and blog entries De Palma found on the Web, a fictional collage (shot in high-definition video) that works as a jagged, reflective mosaic of reality. The central figures in the story are a group of U.S. soldiers stationed at a checkpoint in Samarra. One of them, Salazar (Izzy Diaz), has a video camera, and he's decided he's going to capture the "real" experience of a soldier in Iraq; he also hopes the movie he'll ultimately make will get him into film school. So he records his buddies doing the things they do every day: He questions Blix (Kel O'Neil) about the book he's reading, or attempting to read, John O'Hara's "Appointment in Samarra"; he captures the repartee of two other guys, close buddies, Rush and Flake (Daniel Stewart Sherman and Patrick Carroll), as they trade crude, brain-dead remarks; and here and there another soldier, McCoy (Rob Devaney), weighs in on the proceedings like an observant, but reticent, Greek chorus -- he's hip to the fact that some of his comrades are numbskulls, but he's smart enough to know that he shouldn't advertise it.

Salazar's camera captures both the tedium and the edgy anticipation of the soldiers' daily lives, much of which seems spent waiting for something -- an inevitable, horrible something -- to happen. Salazar's footage, from the soldier's perspective, is intercut with a professionally made French documentary (faux, of course) that shows the soldiers waiting, hour by hour, day in, day out, at the checkpoint. As this fake doc shows, their jobs are tedious, but not innocuous, and they make fatal errors in judgment: When a car refuses to stop (it later becomes clear the driver doesn't understand what's being asked of him), the soldiers shoot a pregnant Iraqi woman, who later dies.

The soldiers, in their recklessness, inflict damage, but they suffer it too, when their commanding officer, Sgt. Sweet (Ty Jones), is killed. The soldiers, listless in their anger, sit down for a game of cards; they get drunk. Two of them, Flake and Rush, decide to stage a raid on a nearby home, as a pretext for raping the 15-year-old girl they know lives there. Blix and McCoy try to dissuade them, but not hard enough; Salazar goes along with his camera, and it's through his lens that we see what happens next.

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