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RENDITION (15)
Dir: Gavin Hood
Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, Omar Metwally, Yigal Naor, Alan Arkin, Peter Sarsgaard
Out now, 120 mins
****
For me, one of the most jaw-droppingly horrifying moments of post-9/11 cinema is Britney Spears’ CNN interview with Tucker Carlson, as used in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. “I think we should just trust our President in every decision he makes,” she says, the blank-eyed, gum-chewing epitome of apathetic yoof.

With that in mind, Reese Witherspoon is perfect for her character in Rendition. Given that her most memorable parts to date have also largely been slightly vapid, Britney-like everywomen – Legally Blonde, Sweet Home Alabama, Rachel’s sister in Friends – what her appearance here immediately suggests is: this could happen to anyone.

‘This’, of course, is extraordinary rendition, the euphemistic term for the practice of abducting terrorism suspects and shipping them off overseas to somewhere where inconvenient trivialities such as actual evidence don’t really matter. Or outsourcing torture, if you like.

We get a bilious taste of this as Egyptian-American chemist Anwar El-Imbrahimi (Metwally) is plucked from arrivals on his way back to Washington DC from Cape Town. He’s hooded, bundled onto a plane, and taken to an unspecified North African country to be left in the hands of their secret police, headed by Abassi Fawal (Naor), and CIA observer Douglas Freeman (Gyllenhaal). Meanwhile, his worried wife Isabella (Witherspoon) does everything she can to find out what’s happened to her husband, leading her to a confrontation with the official responsible for rendition, Corrine Whitman (Streep).

Films critical of the US government, often in the guise of its security services, are nothing new: from Enemy of the State to the Bourne trilogy, they’ve been satisfying Americans’ inherent mistrust of authority for at least a decade. It’s far less common, however, to see such a large amount of criticism of a specific administration or policy, as is happening with the recent slew of anti-Bush films. They deserve it, naturally.

El-Ibrahimi, on the other hand, doesn’t. Though much of his torture mercifully takes place off-screen, scenes of the bound, naked Egyptian being variously beaten, locked up in a tiny lightless hole and then electrocuted are still rather grim. Appropriately, Freeman becomes so uneasy with the interrogators’ methods that he intervenes, quoting Portia in The Merchant of Venice for good measure: “I fear you speak upon the rack, where men enforced do speak anything.”

If a CIA officer with such high scruples seems eyebrow-raisingly unlikely, a Shakespeare-quoting one perhaps stretches the limits of credulity almost to breaking point, as though on a rack itself. But Gyllenhaal – himself a vociferous supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union – puts in an admirable performance, his portrayal of a man wrestling with his own conscience building on the same from Brokeback Mountain.

Corrine Whitman has no such qualms about sending a man abroad to be tortured, and Streep’s turn as a CIA higher-up is the kind of role the expression ‘ice queen’ was invented for – she makes Judi Dench’s M in the Bond movies appear positively cuddly. And yet, in a way, she’s also a weak link.

Her justification for extraordinary rendition is that: “There are upwards of 7,000 people alive in Central London tonight because of information elicited in just this way.” While it’s not hard to imagine that it’s commonplace to hear this kind of self-satisfied response to complaints about derogation from due process, such a facile argument does the debate no favours.

Whether information could have been gathered any other way is never considered, whether torture can ever truly be justified never discussed. If the issue were really such a no-brainer there’d be no need for Rendition ever to be made.

Yet Whitman is presented as morally unambiguous: she is doing what she believes is the right thing, in order to protect - that old canard - ‘national security’. Greater implicit criticism is reserved for Senator Hawkins (Arkin) and his assistant, Isabella’s college friend Alan (Sarsgaard), whose principles call for them to help, but who refuse through fear of being smeared as ‘Bin Laden lovers’.

Likewise, the final twist on some of the possible consequences of torture, though both unexpected and thought-provoking, is a little too knowingly clever, but at least it makes the initially confusing parallel storyline involving Fawal’s daughter make sense.

These minor gripes, however, are merely scratches on the surface of an otherwise well-polished film. Despite perhaps being over-simplistic, Rendition is an engaging and important story, and, given that it’s already being dismissed on film website imdb.com as ‘liberal propaganda’, one that will get people talking – maybe even in the Spears household.

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From the Guardian’s report on the Muslim community’s reaction to this foiled terrorist plot:

“The youngsters are trying to laugh it off. Another said that we all know the human body is 75% liquid.”

What’s the name of that film where someone feeds a load of guys some explosives and they all explode? Pierce Brosnan was in it, before he was Pierce Brosnan.

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Oh dear.

I quite liked the book; despite the fact that it’s an appallingly written load of fatuous old nonsense, it’s actually quite entertaining.

The film seems to have taken all the interesting bits of the book, discarded them, and made a film that is both truly execrable and mind-numbingly implausible.

With the notable exception of Paul Bettany, the acting is dreadful. Even Sir Ian McKellan underperformed. It’s as though they knew how awful the film was going to be and got demoralised.

And the production team somehow managed to spell Audrey Tautou’s name wrong in the credits.

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