Late in Brian De Palma’s harrowing new drama Redacted, two American soldiers sit in their barracks in Samarra, shooting a video eulogy for a fellow squad member. His murder by Iraqi insurgents had come as retribution for a home invasion in which a local teenager was raped and then killed along with her family — a crime perpetrated by this same pair. In lieu of any remorse, hollow-eyed private Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll) unravels a strange, rambling story about his late older brother, gazing a hole into the camera before shifting his intense attentions to his comrade. When the other soldier nervously asks what he’s looking at, Flake offers this non sequitur: “my momma told me it’s impolite to stare.”
This seemingly throwaway remark proves crucial to understanding Redacted. It may also be the last word on De Palma’s career. The 67-year-old director has spent nearly 40 years parsing issues of voyeurism and spectatorship onscreen, from his sly early counterculture films (Greetings, Hi Mom!), through slick, Hitchcock-inflected Hollywood thrillers (Dressed to Kill, Body Double) and a few major works that reconciled his formidable formalist chops with more trenchant concerns (Blow Out, Casualties of War).
Redacted is the director’s spikiest mix of the visceral and the cerebral to date. It adopts mock-doc tactics to shed light on a real incident, the 2006 rape and murder of 14-year-old Abeer Quassim Hamza by five US soldiers stationed in Iraq. “This is a situation where we should be staring,” says De Palma in an interview conducted during this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. “We shouldn’t worry about being polite.”
It’s the same indelicate impulse that prompted De Palma’s 1989 Vietnam War film Casualties of War, also about the murderous misbehaviour of American military personnel abroad. “[The incident] in Iraq was so similar to the Casualties of War story,” says De Palma. “Both are indicative of what happens when you put boys into a war where they don’t understand why they’re there, where the reasons for the mission keep changing, where they’re an occupying force in a hostile environment. And then one of their own guys gets killed, and that’s what throws them off the rails.”
A scene in Redacted where a soldier is felled by a booby trap is directly evocative of Casualties of War’s most shocking moment, and proves similarly catalytic in pushing the narrative towards further tragedy. However, the films’ overall aesthetics could not be more different. Where Casualties unfolds as one man’s tortured memory — a lyrical nightmare — Redacted teems with immediacy. It’s a collage of urgent, untrustworthy and deliberately rough-edged perspectives, and De Palma’s trademark tracking shots are replaced by nervy handheld video. The conceit is that most of what we’re watching has been shot by the soldiers themselves, meaning that at least one actor — Izzy Diaz, who plays the squad’s unofficial videographer — had to pull double duty as a co-DP.
Despite some ungenerous notices from critics so far, the ensemble cast — which also includes Ty Jones, Rob Devaney, Kel O’ Neill and Daniel Stewart Sherman — is excellent. Those who decry the acting as stagy miss how carefully the performances have been modulated to suit De Palma’s rigorous formal strategies. The troupe’s overbearing machismo in the moments where they know they’re being filmed gets abandoned when things get candid — as in the horrific mid-film rape scene, staged from the ghostly-green POV of a hidden helmet-cam.
Other sequences are ostensibly shot by a French documentary crew (the amusingly lugubrious doc-within-the-film, Barrage, is credited to “Marc and Francois Clement”). Several bits are framed, quite convincingly, as streaming internet video. “My mission was to make a $5 million hi-def movie,” says De Palma, who was looking to work on a smaller scale than in recent years, “and I didn’t want to do it without exploring what made [digital video] different than film. Well, everything on the internet is digital, and everything in the film is sourced from the internet.”
A few passages have even been transcribed verbatim, like the video blog of a suburban teenager who compares the Bush administration to the Nazis and urges that the guilty soldiers be strung up and tortured for their crimes. Her rant (performed in the film by an actress) speaks both to the ugliness of extremist sentiment and also the headache engendered by a media landscape in which anyone with a modem can construct his or her own soapbox.
Combine this scene with the savage parody of sanctimonious reportage in the Barrage segments and the shockingly matter-of-fact depiction of an American soldier being beheaded, and it’s clear that Redacted drops the gauntlet for liberal audiences looking for an easy anti-war screed. De Palma’s anger doesn’t extend to pandering.
“When the right wingers rant against this movie, screaming, ‘How could you show these monsters doing these things?’ I just….” He trails off with a heavy sigh before continuing agitatedly. “That’s absolutely not the point. The point is that when you put boys in this situation, this can happen. The reason this film is more shocking than Casualties of War is because we’ve been given nothing but positive images of our soldiers in Iraq. Everything a soldier says is vetted by their superiors. They’re not allowed to talk to the media. It’s absurd. They’re public relations people now.”
The PR for Redacted thus far has been predictably mixed. De Palma won the Best Director prize at the Venice Film Festival but, as he suggests, he’s also been fending off frothing charges of anti-Americanism from the likes of Bill O’ Reilly. De Palma won’t pigeonhole himself as being part of any movement, but he acknowledges that the recent spate of Iraq-themed movies speak to a nation’s need to know more than they’re being told on the record. “In the ’60s, what got us into the streets were the pictures we saw on television, or in Life magazine and Look magazine,” he says. “It shocked us and we knew it had to stop. The architects of this current war were around then — they’re the same people, in fact — and they have tried to co-opt the mainstream media, which is now corporately owned. They’ve tried to keep the pictures out of the general public’s view. But [the pictures] are all over the internet.”
They’re also all over Redacted, which integrates real snapshots with its expertly faked imagery and vice versa. Much has been written about the film’s gut-punching coda, a series of still photographs depicting dead and maimed Iraqi civilians — the very pictures De Palma describes as having been redacted by the US media. The majority of these are authentic; two are not. The task of figuring out which is which has been made easier by the fact that De Palma has been forced to black out the eyes of the victims in the real photos.
“I have been complaining about this,” he bristles. “I did not redact the pictures. The lawyers and our company [Magnolia Pictures] did, because of some highly suspect legality, as if the parents of some dead Iraqi baby are going to sue us in American court.”
Last month, producer/billionaire/noted rug-cutter Mark Cuban offered De Palma the chance to buy back the film and distribute it himself, un-redacted and at his own risk — a challenge that has understandably gone unaccepted. Ironically, Redacted is a stronger film for being forced to make good on its title. The final image, at once the saddest and most hair-raising film frame of the year, strikes an even more incendiary note for having been delineated as “unreal.”
“Yes, [the redaction] does place the final picture in sharp relief” says De Palma, before snarling: “Isn’t it ironic that in order to tell the truth, you have to create the truth?”
Of course, the ultimate point of Redacted is that truth is intensely subjective. What we think is entirely dependent on what we see, what we see depends on where we look, and there are some things that simply lie beyond our purview. It would be irresponsible to say that De Palma’s film offers a definitive perspective on the blood-and-bile spattered Rorschach test that is the USA’s ongoing presence in Iraq. But it’s a start — a hard, impolite stare in the right direction.