What was a mildly annoying plot device in Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah -- filling the screen with grainy digital video to convey "verite" -- is the whole movie in Brian DePalma's kick at the Iraq cat, Redacted.
Basically a remake of his Vietnam rape/murder movie Casualties of War, but inspired by the actual rape/murder of a teenage Iraqi girl by American soldiers, Redacted is a video voyeur's tour of duty. There is no moment that is not made to look like somebody's home movie, website, blog or news-doc standup report.
The result is not only a messy and awkward montage of trendy "new media" lazily substituting for cinematography, it stretches credulity to tell this whole story, this intimately, in this same way, from so many angles.
Moreover, though I'd never suggest the perpetrators of a barbaric act should be softened in their portrayal, DePalma's tendency to paint overwrought characterizations in stark black-and-white seems to go too far here. The psycho soldiers are really psycho, flexing their ugly-muscles from frame one like B-movie villains. If anything, DePalma's hand is even less subtle than it was in Casualties, when Sean Penn pointed at his penis and shouted, "This is a weapon!" before committing his rape.
Redacted (the title refers to the term for the blacking-out of sensitive info by government authorities) has several lens-points-of-view, most of them so contemporary, they'd be incomprehensible to a time traveller from, say, the 1980s. There's a digi-cam held by Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), the wannabe filmmaker of Alpha Company who captures the most intimate (and, as I say, ugly) moments of his fellows' daily lives.
There's a blog run by the wife of putative good guy Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney) following her husband's tour of duty as best she can. There are terrorist websites that carry streamed video of retaliation against the Americans, and on which some key death scenes transpire.
And then there's a French news documentary team that's fixated on the Army roadblocks and which captures footage of a pregnant woman being killed by Alpha company's alpha-psycho Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll), a first-kill that Flake later describes to Salazar's camera as being "like gutting a catfish."
We get it. These are bad guys (unlike Elah, which posits that an unjust war turns good boys into war criminals, Flake is a psycho from a family of psychos).
You'd think a brutal war crime like a rape-murder would be enough to sustain a state of outrage for 90 minutes, but Redacted slathers on the atrocities. There's the aforementioned killing of the pregnant Iraqi woman, there's a beheading, limbs fly when a key character is killed by an IED (improvised explosive device). And as if that's still not enough, the movie closes with a montage of actual photos of dead Iraqis (their faces blacked out by the distributor for sensitivity reasons).
Redacted thus becomes like a cop show, where everything that happens in a half-hour could conceivably happen in one person's lifetime, just not all on the same day.
One would think war is hellish enough to not need "sweetening."
(This film is rated 18A)
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