Oscar season is in full swing and the heavyweight box office contenders are all flexing their dramatic muscles and jockeying for position.
In this weekend’s corner — squaring off against last weekend’s champion “Michael Clayton” — from director Gavin Hood and weighing in at 122 minutes, we have “Rendition,” a hard-hitting drama about the current national policy of kidnapping terrorism suspects and torturing them in classified locations around the globe.
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, Peter Sarsgaard and Reese Witherspoon, “Rendition” is packed with more beautiful people than South Beach during spring break — and they all put in performances that leave little doubt as to their ambitions to give a speech this coming February that starts with “I’d like to thank?”
Gyllenhaal plays the aptly named Douglas Freeman, an eager yet inexperienced CIA analyst stationed in North Africa. After surviving a suicide bombing in a downtown market, Freeman is assigned to discover the whereabouts of the terrorists responsible.
Enter Anwar El-Ibrahimi (played by Omar Metwally), an Egyptian chemical engineer who’s on an international flight back to his American wife (Witherspoon) in Washington, D.C. Upon touching down in Washington, El-Ibrahimi is promptly abducted by the CIA, secretly flown to North Africa and beaten within an inch of his life. Why all the skullduggery? Because El-Ibrahimi has received a few phone calls from a well-known terrorist and the government wants to know why.
Titled after the shady government kidnapping policy of the same name, “Rendition” tries to balance its role as a soapbox and a top-notch drama — and it mostly succeeds, especially in places where the political soapboxing opts for restraint over sensationalism. Yes, the filmmakers want us to know that torture is bad, and that the U.S. government’s policy of torturing innocent people is even worse, but the film also explores the very real threat of radical Islam. “Rendition” avoids the tiresome string of partisan, anti-Bush rhetoric that’s been going around as of late (“Rendition started under the Clinton administration,” Sarsgaard’s character explains), in favor of an indictment of politics in general.
Although well-played, Meryl Streep’s performance as Cruella De Vil?uh, I mean, Corrine Whitman is the weakest link in the film. A super-bitch extraordinaire, Whitman is in charge of the government’s rendition program and the character is as one sided as a boxing match against Helen Keller.
“The United States does not torture,” she says as El-Ibrahimi has his naked ass hooked up to a power transformer. It’s an out of place performance that drags an otherwise genuine film down.
The rest of the characters in “Rendition” are much more 3-D, and they navigate their way through the film as either victims or abusers, trying to understand the morality of their respectively confused situations. Gyllenhaal in particular does an excellent job as the conflicted Freeman (“This is my first torture,” he explains wearily over the phone in one scene) as he tries to make sense of the violence he’s overseeing. Witherspoon, too, steals whatever scene she’s in (usually through tear-filled screams) as she tries to find out what happened to her husband.
Perhaps the biggest complaint against “Rendition” comes in the all-too-easy plot device of Ibrahimi’s innocence. Never once does the film make us believe that he might actually have had a hand in the suicide bombing, and so much of the subsequent drama comes from watching an innocent man tortured — as opposed to examining the ethics of torture in general, regardless of guilt.
“If you torture one person you create a thousand new enemies,” Freeman says. But the film falls just short of making us really believe it.
Oh, well. The film will probably still get its share of Oscar nominations. We all know that’s all that Hollywood really believes in.