Rendition
Directed by Gavin Hood
Written by Kelley Sane
With Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon, Alan Arkin & Meryl Streep
It's very satisfying to know that Rendition is getting a mainstream release.
A pregnant Reese Witherspoon tries to find her Egyptian-born, US-educated husband (Omar Metwally) when he disappears. He turns out to have been kidnapped by the CIA on his return flight to the United States from a business trip in South Africa — all to do with a bombing in North Africa.
Being kidnapped means being tortured in an unknown Arab country (probably Egypt). Meryl Streep plays the nasty person at the CIA who authorises the torture.
A good political thriller, Rendition is a drama of the post-9/11 "war on terror", focusing on extraordinary rendition — the practice of removing suspects to third countries for torture. Often, the suspects have done nothing wrong.
Rendition itself never gets too involved in any one character, relying instead on interlocking plot lines that makes it a good film as well as instructive on US torture shenanigans. There's even a CIA agent with a conscience.
The film targets us with the idea that torturing innocent people is wrong, and this will happen with the right amount of over-zealousness. It leaves unexamined the proposition that all torture is bad, regardless of whether or not the person is "guilty" of anything.
Expecting more than that is perhaps a bit unrealistic for Hollywood, and the moral fudging was perhaps necessary to allow a mainstream release.
The film's failure to interrogate the issue of torture as a whole is unfortunate, as the idea of legitimate torture is one that has been percolating away in some intellectual circles in the United States for some time, with advocates including law professor Alan Dershowitz, who discusses it in his book Why Terrorism Works. Dershowitz advocates a "torture-lite" approach by suggesting that universities run professional training courses for torturers. A BA(Hons) in Torture Studies perhaps?
Rather than being a right-wing nutter, Dershowitz does have a bit of a civil liberties background, which shows just how far some liberals have drifted under the pressure of the "war on terror". For a good article on why torturing anyone (even "terrorists") is immoral and the fallacy of the "ticking bomb" justification, I recommend an excellent article by Melbourne philosopher, Catherine McDonald. Torture does not produce good intelligence — but it is very good at terrifying a civilian population.
As they say in the movie critic game — the film has received "mixed reviews". However, as a piece of drama I thought it worked quite well. If there is a weakness, it is one common to a lot of US films with an international canvas: a hectic and cobbled together mosaic of scenes that makes it feel a bit like an action film, rather than a straight political thriller.
There is a subplot, which I won't spoil by discussing, so it is not a straightforward and unrelenting focus on torture. The torture scenes are not too graphic for the squeamish, despite the MA15+ rating.
The major strength of this film is that it will bring home to many people exactly what extraordinary rendition means and how this is authorised by the US government. Michael Adams of the SBS Movie Show gives the film three stars — but I'd settle with 4.
[Catherine McDonald's article "Defusing the 'ticking bomb': why the argument for torture fails" can be found at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5716.
Dale Mills is a graduate student at Sydney University's Centre for International Security.]