The “UNINTENTIONAL COMEDY” By Brain De Palma
Main Hollywood Trade Mag Trashes De Palma Film: “Nothing Newâ€
Some bozo with a bald head doing a reportedly shitty job playing a soldier in “Redactedâ€, a film which Time Out magazine said degenerated into unintentional comedy
Brain De Palma may have just been awarded the Best Director trophy by decrepit French actress Catherine Deneuve and the rest of her Venice Film Festival jury, but the critics are already starting to trash it. ( Time magazine, however, spit in the face of the troops by praising De Palma as a “vetâ€. Yes, it was a reference to his increasingly regrettable filmmaking career, but the sly comparison to combat veterans is a pathetic attempt to award the same dignity and credibilty ( won in blood ) of our troops, to the long-irrelevant, burnt out hack Salieri ( apparently won by easy years in the director’s chair barking orders and blowing on cappucinos ). Just try to watch his most recent films, if you doubt my “burnt-out hack Salieri†charge… )
In the film, renegade soldiers leave their base of their own accord on a “private†night mission and commit the rape and murders. They also kill a pregnant woman at a checkpoint and show no remorse. I guess these two events are a display of Mark Cuban and Brian De Palma’s definition of “Pro-Troop†filmmaking. I guess the fact that one of these guys has a conscience attack and turns the others in is what ultimately makes the film a powerful “Pro-Troop†statement. Or maybe it’s just enough plausible deniability for them to get away with their “troops as monsters†smear.
From Variety:
“Redactedâ€
The bullet veers far off the mark in Brian De Palma’s “Redacted.†Deeply felt but dramatically unconvincing “fictional documentary†— inspired by the March 2006 rape and killings by U.S. troops in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad — has almost nothing new to say about the Iraq situation and can’t make up its mind about how to package its anger in an alternative cinematic form. HD-lensed item, largely using thesps with legit experience, feels more like a filmed Off Broadway play than a docudrama, and has trouble establishing a consistent dramatic tone. Curio biz looks likeliest for this Magnolia release Stateside.
From its title and intriguing opening (which shows words blacked out on a document by a censor’s pen), the film seems determined to explore the repackaging of actual events by official and corporate media. In fact, it does nothing of the kind. From the first sequence, of Latino grunt Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) recording his buddies on video camera for a docu (â€Tell Me No Liesâ€) he hopes will get him into film school, “Redacted†is much more about the process and techniques of filmmaking than media distortion or coverups.
The breezy Salazar’s fellow soldiers in Alfa Company, Camp Carolina, Samarra, fall into the usual stereotypes: bookish Gabe Blix (Kel O’Neill), who spends his time reading John O’Hara’s “Appointment in Samarraâ€; soldier-with-a-conscience McCoy, a lawyer (Rob Devaney); and racist tree-swingers B.B. Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman) and Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll). Their leader, Master Sgt. James Sweet (Ty Jones), is a motormouth hardass on his third tour of duty.
It’s soon clear De Palma intends to construct the whole movie from “found footage†— Salazar’s vid diary, security camera tapes, an Arab TV channel, websites (both U.S. and Islamic fundamentalist) or other docus and testimonials.
After Salazar’s opening, the first of these sources to show the outfit going about its daily routine at a checkpoint is a (fake) French docu, “Barrage.†Complete with Baroque music, finely shot closeups and a metaphysical commentary — as different from Salazar’s raw, emotional footage as possible — it’s unclear whether De Palma is parodying Gallic documentary style for its artiness or praising it for its detachment. Whichever is true, pic’s technique is already starting to deflect attention from any potential message.
Drama finally clicks into gear when a car driven by Iraqis doesn’t stop at the checkpoint, and Flake and Rush open fire. Even when it turns out the car contains a pregnant woman rushing to get to a hospital (where she subsequently dies), the two soldiers remain unrepentant. In dialogue that sounds too theatrically scripted, Rush contends, “You can’t afford remorse. You get remorse, you get weak; you get weak, you die.â€Violence escalates when the locals take revenge on one of the group, in a well-staged shock sequence. After a night raid on a private house, seen from the p.o.v. of an embedded journalist, and the subsequent media hoo-ha, Flake and Rush pressure the rest of their group to return on a private mission. Secretly helmet-cammed by Salazar, this ends in the horrific rape of a 15-year-girl and the shooting of her and her family.
Shot in half-shadow amid general hysteria, this sequence does have a raw power, but its impact is diluted by the pic’s increasingly wobbly tone and the characters’ lack of depth. Dialogue simply checks off issues rather than developing arguments, and there isn’t the faintest trace of any moral or ethical complexity visible onscreen.
De Palma the technician and film buff too often gets in the way of De Palma the filmmaker with a cause. And there’s little here that he didn’t already say in “Casualties of War,†with which “Redacted†shares several character and story parallels.
Ironically, pic’s most powerful section is its final 10 minutes, as McCoy’s traumatic experience is reduced, back home, to a bar yarn that ends with friends cheering him as a hero. De Palma follows that with a photo montage of real-life Iraqi victims of violence, dubbed “Collateral Damage†— a harrowing couple of minutes that seems, alas, to be a coda to a better picture than “Redacted.â€
Performances are of a piece with the material, with a slightly overplayed quality that’s more suitable to legit than docudrama. Locations in Amman, Jordan, do reasonable service for Iraq. Rest of technical package is high-quality HD level.
END
UNINTENTIONAL COMEDY - And right on Variety’s heels is a second slam by Time Out Magazine. They rip the film for its utter inauthenticity and ironic light-years distance from “the reality of the war in Iraqâ€. The critic says its so bad it at time ends up as unintentional comdey.
“The look of seemingly fly-on-the-wall footage can sometimes give a story a gritty immediacy — surely what De Palma is seeking — but it can also create an air of improvisation, playfulness and even comedy, and that’s what happens too often here — which isn’t very helpful when you’re trying to convey the real horror of a street-kidnapping or a decapitation. The greatest flaw is that the actors generally aren’t up to the task and so don’t convince as US soldiers — they play like actors playing US soldiers. Much of the film — bar a compelling episode at a reconstructed US army checkpoint where suspicious cars are checked or, too often, fired upon — has a rushed, unrehearsed air to it. One suspects that De Palma has mistook a lack of preparation with his actors for the path to convincing realism.â€