Dir. Gavin Hood, US/South Africa, 2007, 122 mins
Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep
Review by Carol Allen
South African Gavin Hood, director of last year's impressive Tsotsi, proves here that he can bring the same sense of integrity to a major Hollywood movie. Rendition is a multi-strand story dealing with the American government's policy of "extraordinary rendition" - the abduction of foreign nationals thought to be a threat to national security for detention and interrogation (for which read torture) in secret overseas prisons, a practice which is in direct contravention of international agreements which outlaw torture and to which both the US and Britain subscribe.
The victim here is Anwar (Omar Metwally), an Egyptian national but resident in the States since a teenager, who is kidnapped by the CIA on his way home to his wife (Witherspoon) and child in Chicago and sent to an unnamed North African country for questioning by their security chief Abasi (Igal Naor). Official witness to what he describes bleakly as "his first torture" is CIA rookie Douglas (Gyllenhaal), who is under orders from counter terrorism chief Corrinne Whitman (Streep) back in America. Meanwhile, Abasi has his own problems in that his daughter Fatima (Zineb Oukach) is involved with Khalid (Moa Khouas), member of an extremist sect.
It is a gripping and a disturbing story. The evidence of terrorism against Anwar is paper thin and his treatment - stripped naked, incarcerated in a dank underground cell and ruthlessly tortured - is as horrifying for us as it is for Douglas and brings home both how easily a man's normal life and dignity can be stripped from him and the fact that under torture most of us will say anything to stop the pain, which is a practical reason why information extracted by torture is arguably useless. It does, however, also raise the age old question of whether ends can justify means. Streep, chilling as the hard faced and ruthlessly professional Whitman, claims at one point that 700 people in London are alive today thanks to information extracted under torture.
Apart from Douglas, who demonstrates the moral strength we all hope we might have in such a situation, our empathy is also with Witherspoon as the desperate and heavily pregnant wife trying to break through a blank wall of official denial and find out what has happened to her husband. Helping her initially is high flying former boyfriend Alan (Peter Saarsgaard), until he's warned to back off by his pragmatic senator boss (Alan Arkin). As well as the American names, the film introduces an impressive array of little known talent to a wider audience, particularly Mewally, who totally engages our sympathy.
Although fiction the film has an unsettling ring of truth about it. The practice of extraordinary rendition, we're told in the film, was introduced under the Clinton regime but has escalated since 9/11. And this is not just an American responsibility. Evidence emerged in Chris Atkins' documentary Taking Liberties earlier this year that the British government is supporting these abductions in terms of knowingly allowing American torture flights to refuel at British airports.
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