I saw the new Brian De Palma film Redacted today. All I have to say is you must see it. It could be the single most important film of 2007. It’s a very ballsy, gusty effort by De Palma – a director that has made some incredible films in his day (Scarface, Carrie, The Untouchables to name a few) and, admittedly, some big misfires (Black Dahlia, Femme Fatale) – and re-establish him as one of America’s finest filmmakers. De Palma has tackled the big, dark events of American history before with 1989’s Casualities of War – a so-so effort about the horrors of the Vietnam War. Yet Redacted is easily De Palma’s best work in years.
Based on a very real event that took place in the Iraqi town of Mahmudiyah in spring 2006 involving U.S. soldiers, Redacted is a brutal, unflinching look at the very ugly reality of the U.S.-Iraq war. It’s hard to watch, deeply unsettling and bound to stir up serious controversy in the U.S. Indeed, many conservatives south of the border – including Right-Wing Overlord himself, Bill O’Reilly – have already tagged this film as a potential subject of protests and as cannon fodder for anti-Americanism and violence against U.S. soldiers already in Iraq. But this kind of misses the point, to be honest. As much as Redacted does portray some (keyword: some) as monsters, there’s an alarming resignation to the film’s outlook: the war in Iraq is going nowhere, nobody has any idea why U.S. forces are there anymore, and the rules of engagement in the utter chaos of Iraq when no one is ever sure who is on the “right side” are so vague, so dangerously unclear, that it’s possible for U.S. soldiers to rationalize even rape and murder.
De Palma’s biggest innovation with Redacted is his use of a variety of digital film techniques. He includes first-person digital video shots, surveillance video, nightvision cameras, Web videos from fake YouTube, insurgents and even al-Qaeda web sites, even embedding documentaries by other journalists.
While many people already familiar with the situation with the horrors of Iraq will probably not be as shocked by this film, I was really shocked by the graphic violence and very upsetting sequence of events involving rape and murder in an Iraqi household at the climax of the film. Be warned: this is a very disturbing film.
Oh, and just to give you all a sense of how inflammatory this film will be in the U.S., check out the video by O’Reilly on Fox News. I just don’t know what to say anymore about him. It’s almost useless even trying to get angry at a man like him anymore.
