The movie started at 7pm. At approximately 7:10pm, I was overcome with an intense nervousness, not to be abated until literally the last moments of Rendition. Since that time, I have been putting off trying to describe the intense way Rendition affected me, and have heard a lot of other people's opinions of it - something I typically avoid until getting my own thoughts in print. I've heard that Jake Gyllenhaal is a poor actor. I've heard that the film is politically wishy-washy. I've heard that it's too preachy. I've heard that it doesn't sound like the kind of movie that would be enjoyable. And I've wondered if my initial instinct to ace this film, to 5-star it flat out...could that have been wrong?
Hell no. I will not be swayed.
Rendition is a film that wins on all of my favorite levels. It's intensely moving, superbly produced in every sense, tricky and surprising, cinematically creative, and exciting. Plus, it has a bold political message that I honestly feel it examines both sides of. It is timely. It is specific. I am sure that my list of adjectives could go on for pages, but I'll stop now and try to support my lofty claims with some evidence.
The nervousness I mentioned at the outset of this review was fueled, above all, by the angry conflict between two sides of a very real political issue, the use of "extreme measures" to collect information about terrorists or potential terrorists. Specifically, the issue at hand is a particular case of "extraordinary rendition," the act of exporting someone to another country to have them tortured "by proxy." As Meryl Streep's icy character states boldly in the film, "The United States DOES NOT torture," but in this story the CIA is very interested in the results of a particular torturing which it essentially requested to take place. Can we sense some political implications here?
The victim in question is an Egyptian professor who's lived in America for most of his life and is married to an American woman. While he's doing business in the Middle East, his cell phone is found to be linked to that of a known terrorist leader. That the nature of this connection is never explained by the film is crucial to its core question: With so little evidence, no trial, and no leads, is the slim possibility of torturing information out of a person worth the extreme violation of human rights required by such practices? While Rendtion has its share of major characters who truly believe they are protecting more through torture than they are destroying, the film's stance on the issue is revealed through the bewildered protestations of Jake Gyllenhaal's character, a pencil-pushing CIA agent who gets tossed into the middle of an act of extraordinary rendition when his coworker is killed in a suicide bombing. But far more powerful is the other method the film uses to reveal its position: the dangerous but eerily understandable decisions of two Cairo youth.
I genuinely want you to see this movie, so I won't spoil it. But I will say that the actions and backstory of these kids suggests that while terrorism might be the path to torture, torture (and, implicitly, other brutalities and seized freedoms) begets more terrorism and violence. The way this story line intersects and reunites with the main rendition case is the true art and magic of this film, and why I ultimately couldn't be persuaded to take back any of my hastily-bestowed stars.
That said, is my opinion politically biased? Who knows. I have my political stance, and not someone else's. I cannot claim to be anything less than a bleeding-heart liberal; my heart bleeds for the unrepresented and underrepresented masses of our confused planet, and for the millions of us who have been persuaded that our civil liberties and human rights are less important than our sense of well-being. My liberal heart aches at the thought that something as shallow as national ties can make us feel that the lives of others are less valuable than the lives of Americans, in a time when you can circle the entire globe, all the life we know in the universe, in a matter of hours. And this bleeding liberal heart was stirred to heap praise a movie that so expertly illustrates such heavy sentiments. I wouldn't try to review this film, or any other, with anyone else's.
