RENDITION
A Rendering, With Hollywood Shackles Pulling The Political
Punches
The PopcornReel.com Movie Review: "Rendition"
By Omar P.L. Moore/October 19, 2007
Movie poster courtesy: New Line Cinema
"Rendition", a well-intentioned and sometimes hard-to-watch political drama, flaps its cinematic wings and gets singed by the lofty heights that it reaches. The Gavin Hood film (Mr. Hood directed the Oscar-winning Best Foreign Language film "Tsotsi" two years ago) is very good when it develops the story of an Egyptian family rife with turmoil and upheaval because of several key decisions its members make, but goes wanting when it attempts to depict the American side of the drama, which wasn't needed to begin with -- but for one indispensable factor for Hollywood movie-making -- the need to have an American lead star to sell the movie and make it palatable to American audiences. It is in this sense that "Rendition" fails most, namely in the personage of the character played by Jake Gyllenhaal, a U.S. consulate member forced into an ambassadorship role in the wake of a tragedy. The film opened across the U.S. and Canada today.
There are three threads to the narrative: the Egyptian family members, expertly played by (Yigal Naor as Abasi Nawal, Zineb Oukach as Fatima Nawal, and Laila Mrabti as Lina Fawal). The audience is invested in all of their strengths and frailties, as well as the complexity that surrounds them. There is also the matter of a forbidden affair that one of the families members has with one Khalid El-Emin (played by Mohammad Khouas.) Khalid has a brother-in-arms of sorts, Omar Adnan (Najib Oudghiri), who may or may not be a man of peace, a man whose intentions for peace and justice face severe challenges. The warm cinematography (Dion Beebe, who was one of the lensers of "Collateral") and the acting for this part of "Rendition" is the heart of the film, but doesn't get the screen time that it deserved. (A look at the movie's poster completely hides any trace of this vitally important story -- which is a scandalous disservice to both its actors and the audience.)
The second strain focuses on a family headed by Anwar El-Ibrahimi (played by Omar Metwally) and Isabella Fields El-Ibrahimi (Reese Witherspoon), whose five-year-old Jeremy (Aramis Knight) keeps asking his mother why it is that Daddy isn't coming home, after his abrupt disappearance from a flight to Washington, D.C. that has arrived from Cape Town, South Africa. This American family portion isn't sufficiently developed and when the intense torture scenes commence (with Mr. Metwally adeptly sustaining himself in a physically-demanding role) they surprisingly appear devoid of their power. Whether audience members are jaded by the all-too-real life horrors of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, the "Rendition" torture scenes for better or worse don't have the strength or the power that they should. They are intense for sure, but the presence of Mr. Gyllenhaal's character and more significantly, the behavior he exhibits during the torture of Mr. Metwally's character, is yet another example of Hollywood's revisionist rendering and rewriting of history.
Furthermore, we haven't had any sense of Ms. Witherspoon's and Mr. Metwally's relationship -- yet it is debatable that we even have to. At the same time however, it is revealing that the family portrait of this interracial and interfaith marriage and family is not given the proper treatment it ought to have been. As a result, we do not feel totally invested in the plight of the El-Ibrahimis as we should, and are more removed than we should be. The film's screenplay, written by Kelley Sane, feels desperately incomplete.
The third and final string is the political bureaucratic hierarchical wrangling in the U.S. State Department, the CIA (with Meryl Streep playing Corinne Whitman, the unctuous head of the Central Intelligence Agency) and the U.S. Senate, and this is where the film is at its weakest, despite stellar actors like Alan Arkin (as Senator Hawkins), Peter Sarsgaard (Alan Smith) and J.K. Simmons (Lee Mayer). The screen time they have is prolonged and Mr. Hood is caught in a dilemma: he could either spend most or all of the film dealing with the American side of the rendition question (the kidnapping of people to other locales for political purposes for torture), or spend the bulk of its time depicting a family in Egypt and its complexities. Alas, Mr. Hood chooses neither, opting to marry both narratives, keeping the audience guessing and wondering in puzzlement before pulling an ingenious trigger towards the film's climax. There are many things to admire in Mr. Hood's film but unfortunately the concentration on Mr. Gyllenhaal's character, through whom an evolution comes -- at the expense of the development of the El-Ibrahimi family and its bread-winner Anwar -- isn't one of them.
More to the point, the film is devastated by the main character Mr. Gyllenhaal plays. Had Mr. Hood's political drama chosen to be a tougher, more hard-nosed effort focusing more on the harsh realities of torture and on the El-Ibrahimis or more on the Egyptian family, and chosen to make Mr. Gyllenhaal's character far rougher and highly unlikable, "Rendition" would have been a braver, more powerful and affecting film.
"Rendition" is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for torture violence and language. The film's duration is two hours.
The PopcornReel.com Movie Review: "Rendition"
By Omar P.L. Moore/October 19, 2007
Movie poster courtesy: New Line Cinema
"Rendition", a well-intentioned and sometimes hard-to-watch political drama, flaps its cinematic wings and gets singed by the lofty heights that it reaches. The Gavin Hood film (Mr. Hood directed the Oscar-winning Best Foreign Language film "Tsotsi" two years ago) is very good when it develops the story of an Egyptian family rife with turmoil and upheaval because of several key decisions its members make, but goes wanting when it attempts to depict the American side of the drama, which wasn't needed to begin with -- but for one indispensable factor for Hollywood movie-making -- the need to have an American lead star to sell the movie and make it palatable to American audiences. It is in this sense that "Rendition" fails most, namely in the personage of the character played by Jake Gyllenhaal, a U.S. consulate member forced into an ambassadorship role in the wake of a tragedy. The film opened across the U.S. and Canada today.
There are three threads to the narrative: the Egyptian family members, expertly played by (Yigal Naor as Abasi Nawal, Zineb Oukach as Fatima Nawal, and Laila Mrabti as Lina Fawal). The audience is invested in all of their strengths and frailties, as well as the complexity that surrounds them. There is also the matter of a forbidden affair that one of the families members has with one Khalid El-Emin (played by Mohammad Khouas.) Khalid has a brother-in-arms of sorts, Omar Adnan (Najib Oudghiri), who may or may not be a man of peace, a man whose intentions for peace and justice face severe challenges. The warm cinematography (Dion Beebe, who was one of the lensers of "Collateral") and the acting for this part of "Rendition" is the heart of the film, but doesn't get the screen time that it deserved. (A look at the movie's poster completely hides any trace of this vitally important story -- which is a scandalous disservice to both its actors and the audience.)
The second strain focuses on a family headed by Anwar El-Ibrahimi (played by Omar Metwally) and Isabella Fields El-Ibrahimi (Reese Witherspoon), whose five-year-old Jeremy (Aramis Knight) keeps asking his mother why it is that Daddy isn't coming home, after his abrupt disappearance from a flight to Washington, D.C. that has arrived from Cape Town, South Africa. This American family portion isn't sufficiently developed and when the intense torture scenes commence (with Mr. Metwally adeptly sustaining himself in a physically-demanding role) they surprisingly appear devoid of their power. Whether audience members are jaded by the all-too-real life horrors of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, the "Rendition" torture scenes for better or worse don't have the strength or the power that they should. They are intense for sure, but the presence of Mr. Gyllenhaal's character and more significantly, the behavior he exhibits during the torture of Mr. Metwally's character, is yet another example of Hollywood's revisionist rendering and rewriting of history.
Furthermore, we haven't had any sense of Ms. Witherspoon's and Mr. Metwally's relationship -- yet it is debatable that we even have to. At the same time however, it is revealing that the family portrait of this interracial and interfaith marriage and family is not given the proper treatment it ought to have been. As a result, we do not feel totally invested in the plight of the El-Ibrahimis as we should, and are more removed than we should be. The film's screenplay, written by Kelley Sane, feels desperately incomplete.
The third and final string is the political bureaucratic hierarchical wrangling in the U.S. State Department, the CIA (with Meryl Streep playing Corinne Whitman, the unctuous head of the Central Intelligence Agency) and the U.S. Senate, and this is where the film is at its weakest, despite stellar actors like Alan Arkin (as Senator Hawkins), Peter Sarsgaard (Alan Smith) and J.K. Simmons (Lee Mayer). The screen time they have is prolonged and Mr. Hood is caught in a dilemma: he could either spend most or all of the film dealing with the American side of the rendition question (the kidnapping of people to other locales for political purposes for torture), or spend the bulk of its time depicting a family in Egypt and its complexities. Alas, Mr. Hood chooses neither, opting to marry both narratives, keeping the audience guessing and wondering in puzzlement before pulling an ingenious trigger towards the film's climax. There are many things to admire in Mr. Hood's film but unfortunately the concentration on Mr. Gyllenhaal's character, through whom an evolution comes -- at the expense of the development of the El-Ibrahimi family and its bread-winner Anwar -- isn't one of them.
More to the point, the film is devastated by the main character Mr. Gyllenhaal plays. Had Mr. Hood's political drama chosen to be a tougher, more hard-nosed effort focusing more on the harsh realities of torture and on the El-Ibrahimis or more on the Egyptian family, and chosen to make Mr. Gyllenhaal's character far rougher and highly unlikable, "Rendition" would have been a braver, more powerful and affecting film.
"Rendition" is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for torture violence and language. The film's duration is two hours.
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