“In all the years you’ve been doing this, how often can you say that we’ve produced truly legitimate intelligence?”
“Extraordinary rendition” is the controversial CIA practice of snatching suspected terrorists from the streets and sending them to another country where foreign professionals can torture them for information. It allows the government to circumvent their own country’s laws regarding interrogation. Authorized during the Clinton administration, this government-sponsored abduction process serves as the central plot device in Gavin Hood’s political thriller, Rendition. The real story of the abduction of a German-Lebanese man, Khaled El-Masri—in which he was mistakenly identified as another man, flown to a military black site in Afghanistan, strip-searched, interrogated, tortured, sodomized, and starved before the CIA admitted its mistake and released him—serves as the cheery inspiration for the story. Told in a now-familiar international mosaic style, the film’s ensemble cast—ranging across the spectrums of age, race, and means—shows the viewer American political life and suburbia, as well as a slice of radical Islamic culture.
Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally) is an Egyptian-American chemical engineer married to Isabella (Reese Witherspoon); the couple have one young son and Isabella is pregnant with their second child. When Anwar boards a flight home from a professional conference in South Africa, he is snatched from the plane, and his electronic credentials are taken out of the system. In such a situation, Isabella is nearly helpless; Anwar has simply disappeared. Because his cell phone had received a suspect phone call—possibly from a terrorist, but maybe not; perhaps his phone had been lost and used by someone else—the CIA had decided to exercise the process of extraordinary rendition. Although his background checks out—Green Card, passport, steady job—and he passes a lie detector test, they decide it is still worth sending him to a black site for interrogation at the hands of a professional.
Although the film’s goal of exposing the hypocritical nature of rendition is noble, it is overly dramatized and emotionally manipulative. It relies heavily on the familial situations of the main characters to present the political uncleanliness of the process, even though it has ample moral grounds to prove its point without them. Despite being well along in her pregnancy, Isabella makes the effort to meet with her old friend and potential love interest Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard), who works as an assistant for a U.S. senator (Alan Arkin). On the down-low, Smith and his boss are able to point the finger vaguely in the direction of American intelligence superior Corrine Whitman (Meryl Streep).
In Africa (where the CIA has taken Anwar), a suicide bombing has left Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal)—a brooding, analyitical type—as the sole American representative on the case. Filling in for his dead partner, Freeman must oversee the interrogation of Anwar. Abasi Fawal (Yigal Naor) is the lead interrogator, and is efficient at his job. He does not seek the truth, only an end to the torture; this means that he merely requires Anwar to confess that he received the phone calls, and he goes about his job with ruthlessness. Anwar, though, does not confess—he is the repeated recipient of gut-wrenching torture. The threads partially converge in the relationship between Abasi’s teenage daughter Fatima (Zineb Oukach), and a young Islamic radical Khalid (Mohammed Khouas).
The film’s structure implies some kind of cohesive convergence in the films climax, yet we don’t really get it. The characters mostly remain one-dimensional. Whitman is initially portrayed as a callous narcissist, and she remains one throughout. Alan Smith is also primarily self-interested, ultimately unwilling to stake his political career on saving the life of an innocent man. Witherspoon’s Isabella begins the main narrative as a panicked mother whose husband has disappeared, yet despite her education, connections to Washington, and the steadfast support of her mother-in-law, she never seems to get a handle on herself, settling for a permanent mental frenzy. Gyllenhaal’s Freeman actually has a decent arc, but despite being featured prominently on promotional materials, his character simply doesn’t have much impact on the story. Likewise the dependable J.K. Simmons as Freeman’s superior—well-acted, but one-dimensional. Coming off of the low-budget Tsotsi, which features dramatic and affecting development of its eponymous character over the course of the film, it is a bit of a letdown to see Gavin Hood working with such flat characters here.
The torture scenes are brutal. Waterboarding, for those who don’t know (and you will know after watching Rendition, if you can bear to keep watching these scenes), is the practice of nearly drowning the victim by strapping them to a board and placing a hood over their head, then tipping them back and pouring a continuous stream of water onto their face until their mouth and nose are filled with water, prohibiting breathing, provoking an instinctive animal response of disorientation and terror. Pleasant, right? The film raises several pertinent questions, one of them being: do these acts of torture actually uncover factual information, save lives, or stop terrorist plots? Freeman even quotes Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice—these victims “speak upon the rack, where men enforced do speak anything.”
But crucially, the film only shows us innocent victims. It’s point, I think, is to show us that this practice is morally wrong; not that it is morally wrong only when they snatch an innocent man. Screenwriter Kelly Sane’s script, while thoroughly researched, presents its central conflict as entirely black and white. The film pretends to be addressing whether torture can be justified, but due to the strict dichotomy of the good and evil forces, it never gets in the mud and actually wrestles with the question. Whitman posits that the practice has saved thousands of lives, and the statistician Freeman retorts that only ten percent of those tortured reveal information. But an innocent man will not offer any helpful information, so of course it is wrong to torture him.
Hollywood has the opportunity to have a major impact on the American collective psyche, and a unique ability to “educate” the culture at large. There are threads here for the provocation of many important questions—does torture even work? Is the radical Khalid solely responsible for his actions? What motivates a young man to become a suicide bomber?—but they are never really chased down. We get a limited amount of backstory that gives us a sense that Khalid is dutifully following in his older brother’s radical footsteps, but it is mostly superficial. We are merely left with a political thriller. Which is not to say it isn’t good, just that it didn’t realize its full potential, settling for a skin-deep interrogation of the issue rather than earnestly trying to provoke deeper thought. As Joaquin Phoenix’s Jack says in Hotel Rwanda, “I think that when people turn on their TVs and see this footage, they’ll say, ‘Oh my God, that’s horrible,’ and then they’ll go back to eating their dinners.”
The topics that the film deals with—civil liberties, national security, religious extremism, terrorism—are complex; it would have been a feat to achieve a globe-trotting story that brought them together in a way that didn’t dumb it all down into a black-and-white, good vs. evil narrative. The narrative’s spatially separated characters allows the film to contrive the plot by separating them temporally as well, without making the viewer aware of it. This allows the climax to have more heft, as the disparate stories hit their beat at the same moment. But the stories are not truly linked by anything more than coincidence. While the film is competently directed, acted, and constructed, it is ultimately let down by its safe script.