Muddled Melodrama Leads to a Faulty Rendition

Given the highly-charged political and racial climate currently surrounding Columbia—not to mention the Supreme Court’s recent refusal to hear the case of a German citizen who claims he was abducted and tortured by CIA agents while imprisoned in Afghanistan—a film such as the torture-by-proxy thriller Rendition, which opened Friday, could not have arrived at a more opportune time.

It is unfortunate, then, that director Gavin Hood (whose Tsotsi won an Oscar for best foreign language film in 2006) and screenwriter Kelley Sane allow melodrama and genre conventions to deflate the film’s impact.

Following the Babel method of storytelling, Rendition juggles the stories of various characters—a CIA agent, a pregnant housewife, a rebellious North African teenage girl—facing the political and ethical implications surrounding the U.S. government’s policy of “extraordinary rendition,” an extra-legal process which involves the abduction and subsequent transfer of suspected terrorists to secret overseas prisons, where they are then interrogated under threat of torture.

Soon after the film opens with a primal, throbbing drumbeat, we are introduced to Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal), a CIA analyst based in North Africa. A rookie, he approaches his job with a jaded sort of compliance that betrays his youth, although he is serious about completing assignments. But when he is appointed to oversee the cruel interrogation of Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), an Egyptian-American chemist abducted while flying home from South Africa to Chicago, Freeman is forced to reconcile his professional and moral duties.

Similar choices confront the other protagonists, including Anwar’s wife Isabella (Reese Witherspoon), who, in her search for the truth behind her husband’s disappearance, risks finding skeletons in his closet. There’s Isabella’s former college friend Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard), an aide to Senator Hawkins (Alan Arkin), who puts his career on the line to help his old flame. Then, Corinne Whitman (Meryl Streep), CIA’s head of terrorism, who justifies the rendition process by explaining that it might save lives. And Fatima Fawal (Zineb Oukach), an Arab girl torn between her loyalty to her father—the head of the secret prison detaining Anwar—and her Islamic fundamentalist boyfriend.

While there might be a worthwhile argument in favor of extraordinary rendition, Hood and Sane do little in the way of providing a balanced perspective, characterizing their Washington, D.C. bigwigs as immediately unlikable power players—particularly Streep, who essentially reprises her snarky Devil Wears Prada role. Gyllenhaal, in his most grown-up role to date, is ineffective as our mopey moral compass and over-relies on down-and-out bar scenes to convey his distress. Witherspoon, as our emotional connection to a complex political issue, is reduced to a hysterical worrywart who predictably goes into labor with the gleaming Capitol building in full view behind her.
The forbidden lovers, Oukach and Moa Khouas, do a noble job of exploring how forcible coercion breeds more terrorism, but ultimately they, like everyone else, are at the mercy of the filmmakers’ heavy-handed treatment.