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Movie review: “Rendition”
BY MAGGIE SCOTT
A pregnant wife; a vengeful brother; a true believer; a relentless interrogator; a fixated bureaucrat; a cautious legislator; a naïve congressional aide; a rebellious daughter; and a doubting intelligence officer. The innocent and the guilty; all caught in the violent undertow of an unreasoning cause.
Director Gavin Hood’s new thriller “Rendition” effectively weaves the devastating personal and political fallout produced by unquestioning obsessions and loyalties on the part of the “good” guys and the “bad” guys. An upstanding man of Egyptian ancestry, living and working (green card status) in the U.S. for 20 years is caught in the dragnet of a rigid counter-terrorism agenda.
Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally) is a chemical engineer, with no stronger connections to radicals than his national origin, wrong numbers on a phone record and brief work with a government agency-sponsored bomb detection group. Protestations of innocence, a clean polygraph, appeals to his captors’ humanity as a father with a pregnant wife are of no avail.
Anwar is hooded and shackled and extradited by force overseas; where he disappears, by the “authority” of Corinne Whitman (Meryl Streep), a CIA bigwig determined to make the connection between Anwar and those responsible for a bombing that killed 19 people and a CIA officer, somewhere in northern Africa.
Seeking answers is Anwar’s wife, Isabella (Reese Witherspoon). Certain of her husband’s innocence, she believes her government would act in the interest of truth. She asks for help from Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard), a former boyfriend, now working for a U.S. senator (Alan Arkin). Alan’s efforts to move his boss to action run into a stone wall erected by the prevailing fear of rocking the national security boat.
Meanwhile, Anwar is being tortured. At first, the questioning is being dispassionately observed by CIA analyst, Doug Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal). But, before long, he realizes that the beating, water boarding and electric shock are not only inhuman but ineffective at yielding any useful information. Do they have the wrong man?
Doesn’t Anwar’s tormentor see? Abasi Fawal (Igal Naor) is relentless in his conviction that Anwar is guilty. Someone tried to assassinate him, and he is blind to anything that does not fit in his quest to connect Anwar to the group that planned the bombing. That blindness is not only in the torture chamber.
It is at home, where the daughter (Zineb Oukach) he has arranged a marriage for has decided to defy him and run away with a young man she cannot see, until it is too late, has a tragic connection to her father.
A mind-bending twist of narrative time frame near the film’s conclusion only temporarily disorients. Then comes the blow of understanding with greater horror of the devastation caused by the net of extremism that catches the innocent as well as the guilty.
This is a skillfully crafted portrait of the consequences of the abuse of power and single-minded blindness to truth, justice and reason. A Level 1 Entertainment production, New Line release, rated R for violence, nudity.
