REDACTED, incoming...

I'm thinking REDACTED is easily Brian De Palma's worst, most revealingly wretched film.

This didn't strike me as much different than one of his thrillers - it honestly feels as puerile at many points. And for all his vaunted technical prowess, I often find his entertainments smug and condescending in the extreme. I get the idea that we're not supposed to notice 'how he's playing us', and if we do, we're supposed to align ourselves with him and giggle at 'how the audience is being played'. I sense more derision than joy coming from De Palma the virtuoso.

What's most galling about REDACTED is - as advertised - its casual exploitation of the troops serving in Iraq, though not quite in the way assumed by pundits, sight unseen. Because De Palma doesn't even try to view the troops as more than pawns of his narrative, we never get inside their experience. Nothing impacts. Their frustration, paranoia, braggadocio, confusion, patriotism, boredom, kinship, acrimony, potential or eventual psychosis - all theoreticals, all written conceit. There is no feeling for their day-to-day lives, much less how disgraces like the one depicted actually occur, except in the most diagrammatical, first-draft treatment sense. It's just a series of causes and effects. De Palma doesn't seem at all concerned with empathy, so instead the soldiers concerned are either monsters or moral weaklings, judged by his appropriation of the unblinking gaze of video. A few stock arguments and halting, crocodile-teared confessionals don't serve the characters, only De Palma's condemnation of what he's deemed their mendaciousness. The actors are passable, but hung out to dry. He gives them nothing to play but what he needs to make whatever his immediate point is.

He's left himself open to accusations that he's using the troops here just as he believes they're being used by the current administration.

REDACTED is just empty - a disingenuous, self-righteous, worst of all *unimaginative* exploitation film with total stock ciphers being put through pre-ordained paces. CASUALTIES OF WAR is not a favorite of mine, but it's at least heightened and operatic enough to almost pass as real human feeling and outrage. De Palma seems mostly content here to repeat that film's points with none of its filmic persuasiveness: that war makes a beast of man, that you can't tell your friends from enemies on either side of a conflict. What's he saying that he didn't say better, if more histrionically, in the previous film? What's he saying specific to *this* war?

Whatever his intent, the resultant film seems only facilely concerned with the war, and more committed to playing familiar games with suspense and visual perspective. I should probably be thankful that nothing here is as attenuated into perverse abstraction as it would be in one of his thrillers, as the form precludes his usual 'slo-mo master-class in agonizing suspense!' setpieces. But If the dominant medium of expression is to be content apparently collected off the internet, then why isn't it mined for more than just easy ways in and out of camcorder cul-de-sacs and facilitation of Hitchcock 'ticking bomb' scenarios? And what is being 'redacted', anyway (aside from the self-satisfied climactic atrocity montage)? Where's this indictment of the media De Palma keeps going on about in interviews? It's all extra-textual. There's nothing in the film to illustrate De Palma's rage that the media shies away from graphic depictions of bloodshed in their coverage of this war. And it would have been a most useful component.

The film could have expressed De Palma's avowed concerns by including discussion among video bloggers about what is and what is not appropriate to release publicly - does the camera always reveal the truth, even if the nature of that truth isn't always that which was intended to be disclosed? Is there a point at which showing how soldiers interact with each other becomes inconvenient to unequivocal support for them? What is the gulf between the intent of an interaction between a troop and the locals, and how it is received by the locals? How are the Iraqi's opinions of checkpoint soldiers being changed over time not only by bad experiences and miscommunication, but by mistrust sown by controlled, deliberate misinformation provided to them? And vice versa? Why not show how all sides engage in propaganda and redaction to manipulate the responses of their intended audience? Most of these ideas are introduced in the film, only to be left un-elaborated upon in favor of keeping a strong narrative through-line for this very simplistic story. And why are the only Iraqi voices in this either victims or insurgents - and then neither voice engaged with anyway?

Say what you will about it, but at least CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST saved a place for itself in its final indictment, just by the very fact of its existence. I get no such sense of self-awareness on De Palma's part. I think he expects us to think that he's 'blowing it all wide open - you dumb schmucks, you sheep'. He seems to have set out to make a film for people of his generation who have no interest in seeking out information themselves, who trust that the nightly news they watch over dinner is the whole story. For anyone with even an ounce of healthy cynicism about the media, the film is left to stand on its own merits as a narrative. For anyone who's seen CASUALTIES, you've already heard this one. For anyone interested in an exploration of form, REDACTED is surprisingly unadventurous. For the politics, you'll have to read De Palma's interviews about the film.

And that ending montage? Absolutely noxious in its showcasing of De Palma's hubris. Showing real dead bodies to 'seal the deal' doesn't fly if you can't get the fictional ones to live.

A good review, Jeffrey. One of the things I've found most interesting about my gradual exposure to REDACTED is my increasing disappointment in what I'm seeing based on preview clips and quick blurbs, even while I'm personally quite sympathetic to De Palma's ostensible politics and viewpoint (going off what he's said in recent interviews). It feels as if De Palma could have more productively made a real documentary (say, by interviewing returning vets, using archival and contemporary footage, and showing how certain real life events are played down or 'redacted' from the media, at least in the US), and the film REDACTED didn't necessarily need to be a 'De Palma film', even though he wrote it, as I'm not sure the overriding concerns he has with games about 'suspense and visual perspective' as Jeffrey it, are what the topic needs.

I recall sitting down to watch BLACK DAHLIA recently and switching off literally only a couple of minutes into the film, as what I was watching seemed so ham-fisted and arch.

Of course, I'm sure every filmmaker would be happy to have more critics of their work like myself, who slam two of their films without having watched either. Anyway, I'm interested in the topical subject - I visit lots of political blogs and by far the majority of my feelings about the issue aren't appropriate for Mobius - but I'm not anticipating REDACTED to play any differently from how Jeffrey has described it.

I'd give it a try, not that I expect REDACTED, this year's DEATH OF A PRESIDENT (controversy and buzz likely in inverse proportion to viewership), to play more than a handful of arthouse theaters before shuffling off to DVD and HDMovies Net (which aired it last Wednesday). It's inciting more conversation than anything else, and that is a good thing.

I interviewed De Palma for the Winter issue of Cineaste, which will hit the stands in early December. I agree it's a deeply flawed film, but it's also the most interesting (maybe the only interesting) feature about Iraq to date (given the boxoffice I doubt there will be many more Iraq/Afghanistan/war on terror pix barreling down the pipeline once the current crop is through). And I was surprised De Palma, who has not exactly been on a roll lately, had the moxie to push it through. I loved his films (well, most of them) from about 1973-1987, but the last couple of decades, with a few exceptions, have been challenged. His complete abandonment of his usual style, in favor of the blunt, 2D-ness of blogs and docs, felt liberating.

I have no real beef with what Jeffrey so cogently noted, except perhaps to say that this war has been fought with our soldiers cast as the other, as much as not moreso than the Iraqis (and that I found the film not at all suspenseful, or trying-to-be-suspenseful). There is no draft--a crucial difference between Vietnam and now, one that has kept civil unrest to a bare minimum--and it's clear that the administration wants to keep "our guys" under wraps, doing their job off the front pages and the newscasts as much as possible after PR gaffes like Abu Ghraib and the real-life incident that is the basis of the film, save for the daily, bloodless casualty reports. You feel it, of course, differently if you know someone over there. And we all feel the war in different ways, but more abstractly. The overwhelming feeling is that it is something happening over there, for our overall benefit, so, you know, MYOB and move on.

REDACTED attempts to puncture this security blanket, but it does it by adopting the forms in which the war comes at us via the media. We don't know the soldiers in the film, any more than the various parties filming them do. They come at us from a distance--and as the writing and acting are on the level of blog and YouTube rants we are mostly alienated from them. It's the processing and manipulation of what we see them doing that gives the film its primary interest, and the coda--the now-redacted photos, ending with the staged one, presented on the larger stage of the big screen--its resonance. That is, if you find it resonant. I did, despite other flaws.

I must say De Palma was a more open talker than I ever figured. I would've liked to have spent all day with him, and to have seen the film again before sitting down with him. Maybe there's more there than meets the eye, maybe less--but there's something squirmy and difficult-to-shake going on that I found arresting. It got me thinking about the war again, after a period of more or less shrugging helplessly and going-with-the-flow.

I haven't seen the film and feel iffy about it based on the advance word, so I'm not defending it per se. And I have very mixed feelings about DePalma as an artist, so I'm not coming here with that agenda. But come on. How many soldiers died due to DePalma's "exploitation" of them? There's no comparison. Give me a break.

I'm sorry if I've overstated the point I was trying to make. I did honestly find De Palma's reliance on stock characterizations here to be unseemly on its own terms, but perhaps any sort of explicit comparison is ill-judged.

What I was attempting to say is that by denying these soldiers dimension as characters, he's made himself vulnerable to charges of exploiting them as symbols to advance an agenda - as I'm sure he'd be quick to accuse this administration of doing to their own ends.

The degree and fallout relative to each is of course incomparable.

This post has been edited by JEFFREY ALLEN RYDELL on Nov 18 2007, 01:41 AM

The New York Press' Armond White loves everything De Palma, but even he absolutely hated REDACTED, calling it "head-in-the-sand nostalgia" and the "low point of a great filmmaker's career."

I would provide a link to his piece (the longest one he's ever had in the paper), but I couldn't find it on the paper's website. (I read the print edition.)

White, I think, is piqued that De Palma, his favorite lost cause filmmaker, is getting strong (or at least thoughtful) reviews from key quarters regarding REDACTED. And he's quite conservative, so it's no wonder the film is a no-fly zone for him. It's a spurned lover review but again interesting reading.

I'm sorry if I was a little snarly, Jeffrey. It's just that I've long since gotten tired of accusations against anti-war folk that their stance does this or that dreadful thing to the troops. Hypocrisy strikes me as too mild a word for such accusations. But in my knee-jerkiness, I may have unfairly lumped you into that pattern.

I still think stock soldier characters are so standard in war films, no matter where they are on the spectrum from politically angry to escapist fantasy, that it would be a bit odd to single out DePalma for such a criticism.

Now, Armond White... I have no reservations about snarling in his direction. "Interesting reading" is a term that can cover a lot of things, I guess, but the only thing that got me through the first two-thirds or so of this review is the same car-wreck fascination White usually inspires. After that, I gave up. What a pretentious pea brain. Rarely have I seen such a supposedly sophisticated writer who so glibly and frequently deployed terms like "limousine liberal" and "anti-American." (And I'm speaking of White in general, not just of this review.) That's not even getting into the usual vomit pail of thesarus-spawned verbiage he slops over his reviews to cover his lack of any thoughts that couldn't be just as fruitfully summed up in a few lines.

His politics are odd and a little hard to parse, and often seem calculated, like his cinematic opinions, to position him as "one man against the world," his favorite stance, rather than to convey any coherent or useful thought.

To be scrupulously fair (for once)... Even I have to give credit to White for the opening paragraph there. If only he could be that succinct and funny all the time, I wouldn't mind that he so often disagrees with me. But I'm not holding my breath.

Heh. I'll be impressed when he actually gives a bad review to Spielberg.

For me the difference is that he's showing soldier behavior in extremis, and that falling back on convention when he himself has raised the stakes is perhaps not the most sensible course of action.

I'm also of the opinion that it's a missed opportunity for more challenging drama.

Funny thing.

Aside from his political snipes, and some typically overextended assertions, I find myself agreeing with much of what White has to say about the film itself.

This is most unexpected.

Armond White is not so hard to figure out. Armond White is doing what Armond White does, which is to take a barometric reading of the general critical reaction to a film, and write his review to contradict what anyone else is saying. Therefore: while everyone-who-is-not-Armond-White is down on De Palma, De Palma is Armond White's cause to champion. If everyone-who-is-not-Armond-White dismisses MISSION TO MARS, MISSION TO MARS immediately shoots up in the estimation of Armond White.

REDACTED is getting De Palma good notices and perhaps even, gasp, awards? Odds are excellent that Armond White will call it De Palma's worst film.

White's self-aggrandizing agenda is so transparent, it's bound to be frustrating and/or baffling when you find yourself agreeing with him... not in part, because you're not sure he really HAS opinions, or is just consciously taking the divergent stance.

If you've ever sensed joy coming from De Palma, then you were the one getting played.

As in, "joy in the act of filmmaking".

De Palma's province is satire and jaundiced sociocultural and political criticism, so a certain vitriol, and outright contempt are strengths in his films. If it helps, try to see it as virtuoso mean-spiritedness. I couldn't argue that there's "joy" in any De Palma film per se, but his philosophy is that man's delusions of rationality are hopelessly inadequate against the unfathomable math of the universe. It might not be joyous, but he has an appropriate and vital spirit of cruel glee.

There's no joy in Buņuel, either.

Glee I get.

I'm not convinced that De Palma is quite the satirical artist he's usually credited with being by supporters. He's definitely subversive, but I'm wondering if its simply at the service of his own misanthropy.

I don't actually require 'joy' in a filmmaker, per se, but was alluding to the more mainstream perception of De Palma as a master craftsman, capable of 'dizzying feats of pure cinema' and whatnot. I never feel he's 'in thrall to his muse', or any such happy-crappy*. I sense aggression.


EDIT: Reading your post again, I realize I'm not tellin' ya anything you hadn't already surmised about my impressions of De Palma, so I'm just repeating myself, repeating myself. I'm gonna go get the papers, get the papers.



*Thank you, Stephen King!

This post has been edited by JEFFREY ALLEN RYDELL on Nov 19 2007, 06:11 PM