Those of us who regard Brian De Palma as a great, misunderstood American director revere him for the same qualities, more or less, that make his detractors crazy.
That is to say, it is impossible for him to make a movie without calling a lot of attention to the mechanics and artifice of making movies.
Like a kid who won’t dive into a pool without collaring the glances of every grown-up present, De Palma revels in look-at-me moments: protracted, self-consciously virtuoso set pieces that shout “technique” to the least cinema-savvy members in the audience.
“Redacted,” his scalding and simplistic cri de couer on the American occupation in Iraq, is every bit as show-offy as such popcorn-De Palma diversions as “Snake Eyes” and “The Untouchables.” This time, however, the technical virtuosity is systematically veiled in the rough- hewn visual language of amateurs and journalist drones.
De Palma tracks the events surrounding the rape-murder of an Iraqi girl by American soldiers — a horrific, truth-based incident that he relays to us entirely through the surveillance tools of the story’s participant-observers. These include a soldier’s video diary, a Web blog by an anxious military wife, Iraqi news reports, insurgent websites that chronicle beheadings and bombings with lurid self-satisfaction. The sole pretender to art (and the only one that contains a dishonest point- of-view shot) is a poker-faced, Handel-drenched French documentary on daily life at an American-monitored checkpoint.
Such mediated storytelling already has become a cliche of independent movies. In this case, the deja vu is thickened by De Palma’s self-referential scenario, which divvies up a squad of American soldiers “Casualties of War”-style between the amoral bad apples, the men of conscience and the nonjudgmental bystanders.
The latter are primarily represented by Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), a genial, loquacious kid with film-school dreams and a camera that refuses to quit, even when his buddies are raping a 15-year-old and gunning down her family. De Palma wants to say that the war’s Salazars (and by implication, complacent American citizens) are culpable in atrocities by their do-nothing watchfulness.
But he reduces the insidious complexity of complicity by the sheer perniciousness of his two troublemakers, Flake and Rush (Patrick Carroll and Daniel Stewart Sherman), whose hedonistic, Beavis and Butt-head shallowness conceals the souls of natural-born criminals.
De Palma shoots himself in the foot, however, by over-empowering these thugs; the message that we take away is that it really is just the bad apples who make for a bad war.
De Palma is a bold, efficient writer, capable of drawing vivid characters with lean strokes. But “Redacted” feels, if anything, too written, too cluttered with polished wise-guy banter and actor-y monologues for the hyper-realistic collage of styles he’s after. He labors to make everything look just right and flow seamlessly, but the artificiality shows through. If righteous indignation was the most direct highway to art, “Redacted” would be his masterpiece.
“Redacted”
R for strong, disturbing, violent content including a rape, pervasive language and some sexual references/images. 1 hour, 30 minutes. Written and directed by Brian De Palma. Photography by Jonathan Cliff. Starring Izzy Diaz, Daniel Stewart Sherman, Patrick Carroll, Mike Figueroa, Ty Jones, Rob Devaney, Kel O’Neill, Zahra Kareem Alzubaidi, Bridget Barkan. Opens today at the Mayan Theatre.
