Iraq in Fragments (of Footage)

Redacted is the second film Brian De Palma has made in his career based on a true story of U.S. troops raping and murdering a teenaged girl. The first was 1989’s Casualties of War, which is one of the most searing, unforgettable movies ever made about the way war can erode men’s conscience—but it flopped at the box office, and to this day it’s regarded dismissively by people who haven’t seen it, largely because it co-stars the “lightweight” TV actor Michael J. Fox. Casualties showed De Palma at the height of his powers behind the camera, taking all of the visual techniques that were a signature of his thrillers—split-focus shots, complexly staged action setpieces, agonizing slow-motion—and using them to dramatize both the horror of the soldiers’ crime and the agony of the one member of the platoon who is unable to prevent it from happening.

But in Redacted, which is set at a U.S. military checkpoint in Samarra, De Palma—at the age of 67—has decided to completely reinvent himself as a filmmaker. Gone is the masterfully controlled camerawork of Femme Fatale and Blow Out, replaced by a patchwork quilt of faked “found footage”: soldiers’ home movies, surveillance videos, blog entries. (De Palma’s surprising late-career embrace of a brand-new low-budget visual grammar echoes David Lynch’s embrace of digital video in Inland Empire.)

So while the outlines of De Palma’s story—which was inspired by the 2006 rape and murder of the 14-year-old Iraqi girl Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi—are an eerie echo of the real-life story that inspired Casualties of War, De Palma’s message is more explicitly, urgently political this time around. De Palma’s movies have always arguably been more about images than characters, but that’s especially true of Redacted, in which he demands to know why so few images of the human cost of the war in Iraq have been seen in North America—why images of dead U.S. soldiers and dead Iraqi civilians have been systematically suppressed by the mainstream media and relegated to the semi-underground Internet sources that he replicates throughout the film.

De Palma knows the power of images better than just about anybody in Hollywood, and nothing gets him more angry than being forbidden from seeing something (or showing it). The film closes with a montage of photographs of dead Iraqi civilians—a sight that preview audiences found so incendiary that Redacted’s American producer, very much against De Palma’s wishes, ordered that the corpses’ faces be blacked out in the release print. The irony is almost too cruel even for a De Palma movie: Redacted has itself been redacted.

Redacted is not a perfect movie. It feels like something scribbled down and filmed as quickly as possible, a film made in the heat of passion. It’s reckless. Frequently, De Palma visibly struggles to find ways to make plot points without violating his “found footage” structure—his decision to have a few of the soldiers’ arguments play out in front of a surveillance camera (which, inexplicably, has been equipped with sound) particularly strains credulity.

Also, De Palma’s attempts at duplicating the feel of soldiers’ homemade videos or left-wing online screeds results in an intentionally strident acting style. I can certainly understand why many critics have dismissed the performances in Redacted—by a cast of unknowns—as amateurish and stagy. (Maybe it helped that I didn’t see the film in a theatre but instead watched it at home on my laptop—indeed, the computer screen might be Redacted’s ideal medium.)

But Redacted also feels alive and risky and engaged in a way that the big Hollywood movies about Iraq, like Rendition and Lions for Lambs, simply do not. De Palma isn’t merely “concerned” about Iraq, the way Lions for Lambs director/star Robert Redford is—he’s practically quivering with anger and outrage. He doesn’t want to show you two actors pretending to die in a fake-looking Afghanistan set; he wants to shove actual photos of dead Iraqis in your face. And he doesn’t care about making his message “palatable,” like Redford; he wants you to recoil. He’s willing to piss off not just Bill O’Reilly, but everyone in the audience. (Even those who don’t already think De Palma’s nothing but a has-been hack.)

Flawed, messy, contradictory, often contrived and unconvincing: Redacted is all of these things. It also happens to be essential viewing.