Redacted

De Palma has built a prestigious career that owes in large part to what sometimes seems like an almost facile approach to atrocity. I'm thinking of that brutal, horrifying (and on some level hilarious) murder sequence in Body Double, but there's so much artfully executed atrocity in the De Palma filmography. Take your pick. (I keep remembering a piece Harlan Ellison wrote describing a screening during which he stood up and shouted something like, "I should have known! Another sick De Palma movie!" as he made his way to the exit.) Don't get me wrong -- I think De Palma's best work is genius. It's all well and good to compose a suspenseful, aesthetically and sexually provocative murder sequence when the impetus is fiction. But when the catalyst for that dark vision is recent history -- or, more properly, current events -- how does an artist maintain the same level of brio?

De Palma can't. The rape sequence in Redacted is appalling and unpleasant, of course. It's also telegraphed far enough in advance that it won't catch anyone off guard, and De Palma refrains from juicing it up. It's interesting in the auteurist sense because De Palma has historically been so unkind to so many of his characters, but what he does here is so different, and so restrained -- it's like a composer who excels at crazy, Wagnerian opera suddenly retreating into humble chamber music. De Palma, the master of the shameless gotcha!, is suddenly dedicated to playing fair. And the soldiers in Redacted who videotape a rape are doing what De Palma has so often been accused of -- exploiting a woman for (visual) pleasure. Does Redacted function as autocritique?

Redacted could be as powerful as it is punishing if De Palma found a mode that he could excel in from start to finish. But he's working well outside of his comfort zone. The film has intriguing passages, including a faux French-language documentary about the occupying American soldiers that's inserted without explanation into the narrative and a startlingly immediate look at what life might be like on the job at one of those roadblock checkpoints we read so much about in the papers. I also liked his incorporation of Internet-style video, including a surprisingly convincing video-blog rant and a grisly beheading. (Never having watched a beheading video to the end, I can only guess that De Palma's team mimicked one effectively.) But the footage of bull sessions and smack-talk between the soldiers has a drama-class feel that undermines more than it convinces, and while it's easy enough to tell what De Palma's going for intellectually and emotionally, it's hard to say that I ever felt any of it in my gut.

It all culminates in a collection of images of real war atrocities at the very end of the film. (The tactic may have been borrowed from Dogville.) They have been a source of controversy because they have actually been redacted -- the faces of the people depicted are partly obscured -- against De Palma's wishes, ostensibly because of fears of legal action by the families of those pictured. (It seems like an unlikely scenario, but who knows? Lawyers.) Before seeing the film I imagined that would be a minor issue, but it actually has a dramatic effect -- the black bars over the eyes serve to further dehumanize the people in the photos, as if they're the sum of their sadly decimated body parts, only worth depicting for a cinema audience inasmuch as they've been maimed. The final photograph, representing the soldiers' victim, thus provides the film's only true emotional jolt -- after seeing so many black holes in place of suffering human faces, mere eye contact is devastating. C

Directed by Brian De Palma
Edited by Bill Pankow
Cinematography by Jonathan Cliff
Production Design by Phillip Barker

Screened 10/29/07 at Dolby 24, New York, NY
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 (?)