Rendition (2007)
New Line DVD (region 4)
d. Gavin Hood; pr. Steve Golin, Marcus Viscidi; scr. Kelley Sane; ph. Dion Beebe; m. Paul Hekner, Mark Kilian; ed. Megan Gill; cast. Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon (pictured), Omar Metwally, Meryl Streep (122 mins)
Rendition is an insightful political thriller in the tradition of Costa-Gavras’ Missing. It concerns an Egyptian American who is removed from an airport during a transitional lull between flights. His baggage is removed and his name deleted from the passenger flight recording his entry into the USA. His wife tries to trace him but there is no record of his entry into the United States, except for a credit card receipt for a purchase made on a flight, despite there being no record of him in such. As she enlists a CIA operative to investigate further, the Egyptian man is interrogated and tortured about cell phone calls sent to his mobile from a terrorist on a two-year bombing campaign. He is suspected of providing weapons design support to terrorists and is held without charge and tortured to determine his role in a bombing which begins the film.
In some ways a modernization reminiscent of John Frankenheimer’s The Fixer, Rendition mercilessly examines the cost to humanity of the increased powers given the CIA to detain and interrogate citizens as part of the war on terror in the immediate post 9-11 era. The gradual revelation of the political machinations enabling the CIA to covertly move and torture terror suspects made possible by Republican policies post 9-11 carries the same sense of despair and rage against American political inhumanity that was found in Missing. There is also an odd generational subtext here: the authorities who condone the torture and violation of human rights depicted in this film, the first to graphically depict the controversial interrogation / torture process known as water-boarding, are older authoritarian figures; represented by Meryl Streep in a role that develops the political menace she essayed in director Jonathan Demme’s remake of The Manchurian Candidate.
As an examination of the ethics of water-boarding, Rendition concludes the graphic (but brief) scene with a discussion between an onlooker and the torturer. When the suspect, who may very well be an innocent in a case of mistaken identity, doesn’t give out any information and the onlooker says that the water-boarding isn’t working and he’s giving them nothing, the torturer insists that the only mention of this in the onlooker’s report is that the suspect said nothing. The doubts the onlooker had about the water-boarding process’ effectiveness were to be kept to himself – the report could only mention a result, not cast doubt on the process: it’s acceptance as an interrogation tool is a given: this is the morality of the War on Terror. Significantly, the CIA sidesteps these ethical issues by having covert detention and torture centres operated outside the USA, usually in league with Arab regimes that have no Constitution, as it is the Constitutional implications of CIA condoned “information-extraction” post 9-11. However, as this situation exists, the film accepts it as the world we live in, seeking instead to contextualize it in terms of human rights and Constitutional ethics.
But in its sub-plot concerning the disappearance of the Arabic torturer’s daughter, the film also depicts the Islamic school mentality that by implication enables and sustains the terrorist Jihad that America reacts to by further compromise of its Bill of Rights through the obfuscations of foreign policy and covert CIA circumvention of ethical principle. Indeed, young people here fear a government that can detain and torture them seemingly at will, just the kind of undemocratic oppression that the CIA is happy to condone in exchange for utilizing its facilities for the interrogation of terror suspects. Arguably in this film, CIA political expediency threatens to reveal a moral hypocrisy which is frightening, although in this film always contextualized so as to be rational – but rational perhaps only in light of the realities and Constituional compromises seemingly demanded as part of the reality of being in the War on Terror. Innocence here is always doubtful.
In this way, Rendition is the first American terrorist film post 9-11 to examine the precise ethics of the War on Terror bequeathed America by the Republicans under George Bush. It is the first post 9-11 film to fully update the terrorist subgenre: significantly, where terror films post 9-11 depicted what has in this book been termed a drama of the right to self determination it was in terms of the terrorist robbing such a right through terrorism. Fighting back against the terrorist design, in the first post 9-11 terror film United 93, suggested that the events of 9-11 now highlighted this theme of the pre 9-11 terrorist subgenre. A Mighty Heart re-configured the theme of the loss of self-determination to the War on Terror in its dramatization of the kidnapping and execution of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl. Ironically in Rendition, the CIA are robbing the right to self-determination through such practices as water-boarding: the moral confusion between terrorist and counter-terrorist being the moral quagmire which the film feels will henceforth dominate the terrorist film as a subgenre. This ironic inversion and re-deployment of the themes of the terrorist subgenre so as to suit a post 9-11 environment is skilfully achieved in Rendition.
Yet, Rendition is also very knowing of the political imperative to fight the war on terror, dramatizing the internal pressures faced by the CIA in this instance – there is evidence of a link to a terror group and an answer must be extracted and if such is interrupted by due process ethics, those who campaign for the rights of the tortured risk being called “Bin Laden lovers”. Again, the theme of patriotism is central here: America’s obligation to the War on Terror, here seen in terms of the moral erosion of humanity inherent in this War. And as the film proceeds, it complicates the issue further – eventually the torture works and the man whose innocence was in question confesses, a fact which vindicates torture to many, even though he may confessed purely to avoid the pain. Yet, as awful as the torture is, it gets results – the moral ambiguity underlining Rendition is that this recognition of the expediency of inhuman compromise is the reality of the War on Terror. Significantly, Rendition introduces torture and human rights as the central themes of the terrorist subgenre post 9-11.
The expediency of torture, the moral imperative to win the War on Terror, and the potential compromises necessary to the US Constitution to do so are the themes propelling Rendition. The compliance between the CIA and friendly Arabic regimes also fighting Islamic terrorism to create designated covert torture zones is the contemporary premise underlying a searing drama of political and human capability in the War on Terror.
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