Saddam Hussein killed over a
million Iraqis. The Taliban kept women in burqas, denied them
education, and treated them worse than dogs. Suicide bombers
regularly murder people all over the world in the name of Islam. Has
there been a Hollywood movie that attacked these despicable actions?
However, there has been a plethora
of Hollywood films that have attacked the United States for standing
up and fighting such atrocities. Rendition, directed by Gavin
Hood and written by Kelley Sane, a male model and photographer, is
but the latest, but probably the most devious and biased. Despite
the clumsy bias and the POV, this is a well-acted, beautifully
filmed (the Director of Photography is Dion Beebe, who is, for my
money, the best in the business), entertaining thriller by Hood,
whose last film was Tsotsi, which won the 2006 Oscar® as Best
Foreign Language Film, and deservedly so.
The title comes from the term
“Extraordinary Rendition,” which allegedly occurs when the United
States captures someone it suspects of being a terrorist and turns
the person over to a country whose laws, or lack thereof, allow, or
countenance, torture in order to extract information about possible
terrorist attacks.
Although the United States has
never admitted that it practices rendition (it was first brought to
the public’s attention by muckraking New Yorker writer
Seymour Hersh, who rarely has anything good to write about the way
America acts), the way it normally would happen, if it did, would be
for someone, generally a combatant in the war on terror, to be
captured abroad. He is then transferred into the possession of the
other country and transported there. The person generally has no
relationship with the United States and has no presence in the
United States.
Egyptian-born civilian, Anwar El-Ibrahimi
(Omar Metwally), working for 20 years in America on a Green Card and
married to a 9-month pregnant American, Isabella El-Ibrahimi
(Academy-Award-winning Reese Witherspoon), is arrested on American
soil when he returns on a flight from South Africa. Anwar is
spirited away to another country and subjected to torture, on the
orders of Corrinne Whitman (Meryl Streep), the head of the CIA, who
clearly wears the black hat in this film. There is no nuance to
Streep’s interpretation of Whitman. She is clearly an unsympathetic,
cold-blooded villain.
Rather than being even-handed,
producer Steve Golin clearly is on one side of the issue, saying:
“I think a large majority of us are
willing to accept that if there is imminent danger that will affect
the lives of thousands of people, one likely way to get information
out of someone who holds it is through forcible coercion. On the
other hand, the United States government has, over its history, in
cases of war and emergencies, abandoned civil liberties. I think by
exploring this issue we are letting it be known that there is a
reason for the Geneva Convention and that there are laws to uphold,
because, in the long run, that’s what makes society work. And I
think by abandoning those things we are going down a dark path.”
Despite Golin’s blanket allegation,
I’m only aware of two instances in American history where it could
be claimed that it “abandoned civil liberties.” Abraham Lincoln
suspended the writ of Habeus Corpus during the Civil War, and
Roosevelt imprisoned Japanese-Americans during WWII, an action
upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, a court composed entirely of
democrats appointed by FDR. Where else has the United States acted
in a way that could be described as “abandoning civil liberties?”
Second, Golin’s reliance on the
Geneva Convention is misplaced. Most of the people who have been
subjected to extraordinary rendition do not fall within the
protection of the Geneva Convention because they are not uniformed
soldiers of a combatant. In order to get around this and to
exacerbate the film’s anti-Americanism, Golin has manipulated the
facts in order to influence the audience to adopt his POV.
In order to be sure he has the
sympathy of his audience, he positions the person captured as a
long-time legal resident of the United States. Further, the victim
is married to a blonde American who is 9 months pregnant. My
understanding is that there has never been an event of rendition
alleged against such a sympathetic subject, but Golin wants to make
his point.
Apologists for the tone of the
film, like Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays Douglas Freeman, a CIA
operative who oversees Anwar’s torture, on ABC’s Live with Regis
and Kelly, point to a speech that Whitman makes to Isabella’s
friend, Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard), who is an aide to Senator
Hawkins (Alan Arkin) as he tries to help Isabella. Whitman says when
weighing the rights of one person against 7,000 people who might be
killed by a terrorist act, she will choose the 7,000. But, because
she is such a black hat, and because she says it in such an
argumentative manner, dismissing the concern of a distraught wife
who is 9 months pregnant, the argument is clearly something that the
audience will view with distaste. This is not a fair presentation
of an opposing point of view.
This is a biased presentation of
the problem. There is not a shred of even-handedness here. To make
matters worse, the story is convoluted, with a time warp introduced
at the end that causes the viewer to become unbalanced.
Had Golin & Co. wanted to make a
serious film questioning the morality of extraordinary rendition,
they could have complied with the facts. They could have a person
who is clearly a terrorist be captured and subject to torture in
order to get him to reveal a terrorist plot, with the fate of
hundreds, or thousands, dependent on the outcome. Will he talk? Is
it moral to torture him to get him to talk to save innocent lives?
These are legitimate questions that are fair subjects for dispute.
But Golin has stacked the deck so that there is no place for
legitimate debate in this film.
I am unaware of a film that has
come out of Hollywood that adequately indicts how Islamic Jihadists subjugate
women, how they kill and maim their fellow Muslims without pity, one
that emphasizes the horror of the terror they are spreading
throughout the world, and how their vicious attacks affect the
victims and their families. No, instead, in film after film
Hollywood chooses to demonize the United States, the one beacon of
freedom in the world, which has dedicated itself to ridding the
world of this terror and to freeing as many people as possible.
Some filmmakers, like Dutchman Theo
Van Gogh, have been murdered for telling the truth about what is
going on with these medieval terrorists. Hollywood apparently
doesn’t have any filmmakers with that kind of courage.