After the triumph of Tsotsi, this is the film South African director Gavin Hood was offered and chose to make — a serious drama about aspects of the United States’s ‘war on terror”. Next he’s proposed to fill the director’s chair on Wolverine, the X-Men spin-off starring Hugh Jackman. At least that should help Hood escape any stereotyping as a director of ‘social conscience”.
Not that Hood isn’t very good at ‘social conscience”, as Tsotsi and now Rendition make clear. It feels as though Rendition is an appropriate film for a South African to direct, that it has been enriched by a South African perspective (or more than one, given the other South Africans who worked on it). Our history of oppression and, in particular, the state’s use of torture are things we have lived with and investigated through the medium of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We might not be healed yet, but it’s part of our national psyche now; most of the US is still trying to face the truth.
Torture brings the personal and the political together in a particularly acute, uncomfortable way; it brings the big public and historic events down to the level of the individual’s body. It’s something that can be argued about, as some have done, calibrating those shades of moral grey. What if torturing information out of one person could save thousands? But we know where that logic leads. What if you have to infringe the human rights of non-Americans to protect the liberties of Americans? Or cut the liberties of Americans to protect … what? The oil industry?
Rendition is set in a North African country that is not named, perhaps for diplomatic reasons. It could just as well have been set in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or even Morocco. In its ‘war on terror” the US government and its secret agencies have used the quasi-legal option of ‘extraordinary rendition” to spirit suspects away to allied countries where torture can be used to extract information, while the Americans, like Pilate, ostentatiously wash their hands. (As Leonard Cohen has it, ‘Killers in high places say their prayers out loud”.)
A version of this has happened to at least one person from within South Africa. The person to whom it happens in Rendition is an Egyptian (Omar Metwally) married to an American woman (Reese Witherspoon). Quite why he gets ‘rendered”, or how guilty he is of any crime, is less important than what happens to him — and the effect of this on the conscience of an American, a CIA agent, who observes these events.
Or this is when the CIA man gets a conscience. As played by Jake Gyllenhaal, he doesn’t appear to have much of a conscience (or, for that matter, much inner life at all) until he is confronted by the realities of the work he’s doing. He’s blank, empty, withdrawn, little more than a cipher until he discovers whatever there is of his own humanity — and acts upon it. When he quotes Shakespeare at a torturer, and very aptly too, it’s as though the dramatist credited by Harold Bloom with ‘the invention of the human” has suddenly supplied him with an inner voice he had previously lacked.
Presenting such a character this way is excellent, and risky, filmmaking. The CIA man is named Freeman (perhaps not entirely accidentally), and he is meant to be the point of linkage and identification for most American moviegoers. He’s their way into a scenario they might otherwise find it difficult to understand, a place in which they might not achieve the necessary empathy. This is a well-known principle of American filmmaking: if you’re going to do exotic locations and alien societies, let alone unfamiliar moral dilemmas, the audience needs to be given someone American, or at least white and English-speaking, with whom to identify. Hence the Leonardo DiCaprio character in Blood Diamond — where such a figure capsized or Capriosized the film. That doesn’t happen in Rendition.
Most movies trying to show the ‘arc” of a character’s transformation in this way would have set Freeman up as more complex, or more of a bad guy, in the first place. What Rendition does is more meaningful than a simple bad/good transition. It makes Freeman representative of an American public whose lack of engagement has allowed the government to do all sorts of wicked things in their name and that of ‘freedom”. Identify with that, people.
Around this storyline others flow: those of the police chief in this North African country, his daughter, the Egyptian man’s wife desperately trying to get information from a senator’s sidekick and a chilly CIA boss. This is well scripted by Kelley Sane and the performances are wonderful, particularly those of Yigal Naor (ironically, or not so ironically, an Israeli) as the police chief and Laila Mrabti as his daughter. Perhaps Meryl Streep, as the CIA boss, is under-used, but then again maybe the dismissive way she exits the story is just right.
Rendition is a full, rich, textured account of a moment in world history, of a situation that is continuing and by no means resolved — not to mention the moral issues that arise from that situation. It’s a fictional tale, obviously, but like A Mighty Heart it gets to the human core of a real scenario. Rendition is sometimes hard to watch, but it’s always gripping; it is intelligent and considered, yet passionate.
Structurally, the film has a major difficulty that I won’t go into because that would be to give away too much. Opinions seem to be divided on this: one reviewer I read after seeing the film said it was all obvious from early on, but I, for one, was baffled for a good 10 minutes, which, for me, drained the ending of some impact. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense; it’s that it might be too much to ask the viewer to process in the time available. You’d have to go and see it yourself and decide.
But that is a sign of the film’s courage — that it would tackle issues as difficult as ‘extraordinary rendition” and the ‘war on terror” without soft-pedalling them, and then give itself a tough formal challenge to deal with as well. Whether or not the movie successfully copes with that particular challenge, there is more than enough in Rendition to make it a considerable achievement.