About 10 people walked out of this afternoon's Telluride screening of Brian DePalma's Redacted, most during a horrific rape scene right in the center of the picture. The bulk of those who stayed gave the HD dramatization of the real-life rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers an overwhelmingly positive reception.
DePalma, who is currently in Venice, participated via video chat in an after-screening Q & A that danced dangerously close to DePalma hagiography from the outset. Moderator Larry Gross (amazingly, the screenwriter of both 48 Hours and We Don't Live Here Anymore) set the tone with his introductory statement, directed at DePalma: "Thank you for making this film, which seems like a real act of moral integrity on your part."
That kind of language would have drawn a eye roll from me even if I agreed with Gross' assessment of Redacted's moral pedigree. It's hard not to be cynical about a fictional film based on real-life events, made by a brand-name director, shot with documentary and "amateur" methods as a model, but saddled with that famous filmmaker's self-serving ideological assumptions about the military and the war. But on some level, it almost doesn't seem to count as a "movie" at all. It's more of a narrative aggregation of pre-existing elements aimed at serving the purpose of a singular ideology. Or, in two words: opportunistic propaganda.
Which is too bad, because conceptually, it's a fascinating project.
Chatting after the screening, the director contextualized Redacted as a drama derived from a composite of internet detritus: blogs, videos, images describing the general situation in Iraq, and specifically, the actual rape of a teenager and the murder of her and her family by four soldiers in 2006. DePalma changes names, transfers the action to Samarra, and presents the single story through at least seven different filters. These include a soldier's video diary, an artsy French documentary (complete with a sweeping score which DePalma admitted is a deliberate allusion to Barry Lyndon), surveillance-cam footage, videotaped depositions, terrorist propaganda videos, civilian video blogs, Al Jazeera-like news broadcasts.
When the multiple modes are used to draw attention to the way each party is mediated by different gazes, it works. There's also some nice subtext about the ways in which the soldiers (mostly under-educated and poor) filter their world through their only reference points for human experience: pop culture. Frustration over an extended tour of duty is "just like" the frustration of working overtime as expressed in Clerks, and a lost soldier is "our very own Private Ryan." Typical of the film's cynicism, we're supposed to imagine that from that point, it's only a small jump to the realm where some combination of exposure to hardcore porn and the ideology fueling the invasion could lead to the justification of rape as "part of winning the hearts and minds."
But DePalma is such a master of the dynamics of looking that his ability to pull this off shouldn't be a big deal, and it surely doesn't make up for the fact that Redacted totally fails to consider the dynamics of being looked at. Real people consciously or unconsciously tailor their behavior in direct relation to who they're being watched by. But almost across the board, the non-actors playing the soldiers here aren't up to the challenge of adapting their performances for each media mode. This is especially glaring in the film's final scene, in which an impassioned speech ostensibly caught by a camera filming a party for posterity is played as if the speaker is trying out for a school play. It's like a Max Fisher production of The War Tapes.
At the Q & A, DePalma became defensive when asked if he cared that about the fact that his fictionalized, extremely subjective film is surely going to distract attention away from the actual documentaries and video blogs in which soldiers and/or Iraqis tell their own version of events with minimal mediation. "We're all on the same team here," he barked in response to the suggestion that there's something not quite ethically kosher about making a $5 million remake of existing DIY journalism. "We all hate this war and want it to end."
But regardless of his intentions, it's hard to imagine the film DePalma has made having any positive impact on the anti-war movement. With the exception of the final montage of real photographs, which DePalma indicated may be "redacted" from the final cut for legal reasons, it's far too stagey to have any real emotional impact. If anything, it's going to further enrage the side that continues to insist that anyone who questions the war or the way it has been fought loves the terrorists, hates our troops, should be executed for committing treason, etc. DePalma aims to hit the jugular, but his approach makes someone like Charles Ferguson seem all the wiser for aiming for the brain.
I will say that Redacted, intentionally or otherwise, raises serious, scary questions about the make-up of an over-taxed volunteer army. The two soldiers directly involved in the crimes come off as inherently nasty sacks of shit; the sweet kid who felt compelled to videotape the rape (as an extension of the stab at class mobility that put him in Iraq with a video camera to begin with) meets a fate far worse than time in prison. Born criminals go over there and get the chance to indulge their most inhuman tendencies; good-natured poor kids looking for money for college go over there and get massacred. It's one of the base horrors of the war churn, and even when telegraphed by an extremely faulty film, it never loses its impact.
This post first appeared here.