Guns blazing

U.S. Sgt. Vazques (Mike Figueroa) stands guard at a military checkpoint in Iraq in Brian De Palma's Redacted. (Maximum Films)

There’s a slide show of sorts at the end of Redacted, a troubling new film about the Iraq war. News photos of dead and maimed Iraqis fade in and out, their bodies spilling in all directions. I saw Redacted in September during the Toronto International Film Festival, and after the awkward, theatrical bombast of the film, I was grateful for these unpublished photos. They reminded me of the real-world stakes that the movie, in the end, did not.

But if you see the film now, those faces will be blacked out. The term “redacted” refers to the selective editing of documents, and for the past month, director Brian De Palma has been making the media rounds delivering furious public statements about the ugly coincidence of a film company “redacting” Redacted. (Magnolia Pictures claims the undoctored photos leave it open to legal action, because De Palma doesn’t have permissions from surviving families to show them.) De Palma’s anger on this front is understandable, but in the movie, his anger acts as a black bar, inking out the artistry and the complexity that could have made an OK film excellent.

Redacted, at its worst, feels like a boomer Vietnam movie built with Gen-Whatever tools. Inspired by real sources he discovered in his research, De Palma uses a mélange of faux-documentary footage, uploads from Muslim extremist web sites, YouTube clips, webcasts and on-the ground tape shot by soldiers. His high-definition video efforts are exhaustive and exhausting, but they only serve as a reminder that De Palma already made a really good, really straight anti-war film in 1989, the Sean Penn-Michael J. Fox Vietnam vehicle Casualties of War. That film, like Redacted, took place inside the moral vacuum where a group of soldiers rape and kill an innocent girl, but it was told like a clear-eyed anti-western, albeit soaked with De Palma’s bloody imprint.

Redacted centres on a group of soldiers manning a checkpoint near the Iraqi holy city of Samarra. The film claims that 2,000 people were killed at Iraqi checkpoints over one 24-month period, and only 60 of those were insurgents. These numbers are appalling, but Redacted does a good job of forcing the viewer to understand the pressure that soldiers face: the tick-ticking panic and hiss of a lit fuse burning toward the bomb. In searing heat, a car approaches. Will it be the one bearing a suicide mission? The stop signs are useless when people can’t read, but most cars do stop, and the Americans and the Iraqis uneasily co-exist. And then, suddenly, one car fails to stop, and soldiers go wild and guns go off. The smoke clears, and a pregnant woman has been shot dead en route to the hospital.

Daniel Stewart Sherman plays renegade soldier B.B. Rush. (Maximum Films)

Yet this disaster is not the central horror of the film. That comes later, when two wing-nut, stoned soldiers with the sledgehammer-subtle names of Rush (as in Limbaugh?) and Flake (as in “flakey”?) coerce a third, the level-headed McCoy (as in “the real”?), into an ambush on a family’s home. The ensuing nightmare is based on the March 2006 rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl named Abeer Qasim Hamza. Along with gang-raping Hamza and setting her on fire, several U.S. soldiers killed the girl's parents and her seven-year-old sister and torched her home.

In this ricocheting, piercingly loud scene, De Palma finally distinguishes his film — and this war — from others that came before. The soldiers’ madness is presented, perhaps too simply, as inevitable. They live on constant high alert, guns cocked, sweating in their helmets, many on return tours of duty in a place as comprehensible as Mars. Every day, the local girls and women pass by the checkpoint with their heads and bodies covered, and the soldiers stare and catcall repulsively. The bodies of both sides are hidden: one beneath army fatigues, one beneath robes, both far removed from human. Watching, one thinks back to the Second World War, and how the faces of the enemies were, for most soldiers, not so different from their own. De Palma seems to be suggesting that the sheer foreignness of this place breeds lawlessness.

But in between the tense skirmishes is a movie that feels like a piece of anti-war theatre workshopped to death at an activists’ retreat. De Palma used “unknown” actors, but the real adjective is “bad.” Meet the war-movie stereotypes: the they’re-gonna-blow soldiers Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman) and Flake (Patrick Carroll); the geek in glasses (Kel O’Neill), this time reading John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra; the sassy black sergeant (Ty Jones). Most of the guys appear to be giving their best Full Metal Jacket to their bathroom mirrors.

On the edges, Rob Devaney turns in a decent performance as the redoubtable McCoy. When he talks to his father via webcam after the rape and murder, he breaks down, desperate to admit his culpability. His father, who appears to be a decorated veteran himself, advises him to stay silent. All this information broadcast to the world, but who wants to hear it?

In the past few weeks, several articles have pointed out that audiences don’t seem to want to watch movies about Iraq. In the Valley of Elah, Rendition and The Kingdom have all done poorly at the box office. But maybe it’s the quality of these movies that’s turning people off, and not the subject. Surely someone can make a film about the Iraq war that doesn’t feel like an undergraduate lecture. Robert Redford’s recent Lions for Lambs was a 90-minute seminar on the vicissitudes of the conflict — interesting, yes, but sort of like being trapped at a booze-free cocktail party inside Gore Vidal’s head.

A night raid on a private house ends in horror in Redacted. (Maximum Films)

Early in Redacted, De Palma shows a scorpion burrowing in the sand, and a French documentarian’s weighty voiceover compares the soldiers to bugs waiting to be crushed. It’s a funny scene, and for a moment, I thought De Palma was going to take on not only the fictions created by nations during war, but also the fictions perpetuated by filmmakers who romanticize battle.

But he abandons this tack immediately, and puts the same “What are we doing here?” debate — one soldier actually asks this — in a funkier package, asking little of us except to beware the media and government filters that prevent an unbiased version of the war. The murders are filmed, shaky-cam, by a soldier named Salazar (Izzy Diaz), who hopes to get into film school. We get it: Casual voyeurism that makes entertainment out of everything has replaced debate. But when those filters drop away, there needs to be something of substance at the centre. Redacted deserves characters who are believable mirrors of the real men and women dying in this war. It needs to do more than make us think; it needs to make us care. Artifice about artifice isn’t art.

Redacted opens in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal on Friday, Nov. 16.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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