Rendition
Rendition is the latest filmic attempt to draw attention to what’s already numbing us in the news. In this case, we have a citizen who is, um, renditioned on the way home to the US for a crime about which he is utterly ignorant, never mind culpable. Writer Kelley Sane seems to want to sow up that it happens (we know) and it’s terrible (yes, we know) and it should stop (of course). It does not offer a solution as to how to stop the current ones, or another way to achieve the dubious goals of rendition, nor does it even illustrate how this one story even came into being. Are all cases like this one, was the story of Anwar (Omar Metwally, in a raw and intense performance) a fluke or the norm? I don’t demand that a movie come up with the answers to the problem it illustrates, but I do demand that its narrative have sufficient legs on which to stand on its own. I am interested in the emotional journeys and red tape safaris of this story, but for such an important and widespread problem, the movie made it feel like an “oops, my bad, we;;, we’ll never do that again!”
The cast is chockablock with Oscar nominees and winners (or should-have-been winners) and every performance is terrific. Metwally is the victim of these unofficial policies. His character’s journey is the spine of the movie, but it loses screen time to a seemingly unrelated pair of couples. Ultimately, their fates intertwine in an ambitious sequence that only lost its power for me due to its over-zealous attempts to emulate what seemingly worked for Crash. Also, I pay pretty close attention, but there is a time-twist (not in a sci-fi sense) that didn’t hold up under scrutiny – the cause-and-effect moebius strip might have been intentionally representing “it never ends” but it just felt like an error, somehow.
Even when Rendition was at its most engrossing, I felt it left me behind by trying to say too much. The issues at hand are complex to be sure, but antiquated notions of arranged marriage, “The US does not torture” stonewalling, and the internal religious politics of “North African” nations doe not squeeze well into a plot about a man being pointlessly tortured while his wife tries desperately to find him. (Never mind all the other subplots.) I have complained about plots that are too simplistic – i.e., about so little that they lose my interest – and movies trying to be bigger than their britches (ahem, Crash). Rendition’s heart is in the right place, but it feels like a desperate single attempt to get it all out at once out of fear of losing another chance. I am glad I saw it, but I don’t ever need to see it again.
MPAA Rating R-torture, violence, and language (also some sexuality)
Release date 10/19/07
Time in minutes 120
Director Gavin Hood
Studio New Line Cinema
