The old folktale “Appointment in Samarra” looms large in Brian De Palma’s “Redacted,” a poisonous new movie about the Iraq War. In fact, just in case we missed the echo of the cautionary fable about destiny and fate, De Palma has characters read the story directly to the camera.
That’s the kind of ham-fisted bluntness that sinks this angry film, which is weirdly similar in shape to De Palma’s uneven Vietnam film, “Casualties of War.” Both movies follow a platoon through a horrific rape involving a local girl.
De Palma is known for sketches in perversity, such as “Dressed to Kill,” or stylized genre things, such as “The Untouchables.” This one is actually a return to his underground roots, when he was making in-your-face movies in the 1960s.
De Palma arranges “Redacted” around a series of supposedly realistic devices: We watch the videocam record of Private Salazar (Izzy Diaz) as he interviews his buddies for a project that should someday get him into film school, but we also see snippets of a French-made documentary, as well as news reports and blogs from Iraq.
All of these are made by De Palma, of course, as he stitches together different angles on the war. Some of this is interesting for a while, although you have to overlook De Palma’s customary inability to capture casual human behavior on screen; the scenes of soldiers joshing around at the base are awkward and clumsy.
Just from a storytelling point of view, De Palma does unusual things with our expectations about the characters — for instance, Salazar doesn’t turn out to be the narrator or even an admirable person, and one important soldier is killed early.
By the time we reach the scene of the attack on an Iraqi girl and her family, De Palma is laboring to make the concept work. And that really shouldn’t be his main concern in such a loaded moment.
Also during this sequence, the most violent characters begin spouting slogans that have become associated with the Bush-Cheney program of Middle Eastern nation-building, dropping “WMDs” and “Mission Accomplished” into the middle of the mayhem. This is so vulgar, so heavy-handed, that even the most ardent anti-war activist would have to roll his eyes.
In short, “Redacted” simply isn’t good enough to launch a debate, even if the film has already become fodder for TV carnival barkers such as Bill O’Reilly, and even if De Palma himself has complained about real images of dead Iraqis being “redacted” from a sequence in the film. The blacking-out of the faces in these photographs is actually one of the rare moments of mercy in this film.
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