Reese Witherspoon stars in the political thriller Rendition. (Alliance Atlantis)
“Extraordinary rendition” is doublespeak for an American extrajudicial program that ships suspected terrorists to another nation where protocols for interrogation aren’t hamstrung by silly things like, say, the U.S. Bill of Rights. Rendition, a political thriller directed by Oscar winner Gavin Hood (Tsotsi), shares the point of view of some critics who have dubbed this process “torture by proxy.” On his way home from a business trip, Anwar (Omar Metwally), an Egyptian-American chemical engineer, is abducted at the airport by the CIA and erased from his flight’s manifesto, before being sent to an unspecified North African nation where he is stripped, half-starved, shocked and waterboarded. Some dubious intelligence has linked him to a terrorist cell responsible for a suicide bombing that killed an agent, but the film hints that his real crime is simply FWM: flying while Muslim.
Back home in America, Anwar’s very blond, very pregnant and very worried wife, Isabella (Reese Witherspoon), enlists the help of an ex-boyfriend (Peter Sarsgaard), an assistant to a Washington insider. The film ricochets, Babel-style, between these stories and that of Douglas (Jake Gyllenhaal), a CIA paper-pusher forced to observe Anwar’s torture at the hands of a local official (Igor Naor), whose rebellious daughter is clandestinely dating a troubled young ideologue.
Like Syriana and A Mighty Heart, Rendition balances blockbuster entertainment — huge stars, tricky camera work, thriller-style plotting — with a larger message about our post-9/11 world. Mostly, it succeeds in revealing the human and spiritual cost of the erosion of civil liberties in the face of terrorism — especially in Metwally and Gyllenhaal’s wrenching portrayals of two decent men, betrayed and unravelling, on opposite sides of the torture chamber. Even more pointed is the film’s cunning take on the machinations of Washington. Sarsgaard’s ambitious political climber is a crusader for the truth — right up until his career is in jeopardy. His cowardice and complicity are revealed to be as large a threat to democracy as the hard line taken by an imperious CIA director (Meryl Streep).
Rendition’s main failing lies in its biggest draw: Witherspoon’s Isabella is a blank — a movie-of-the-week woman-in-peril, without a back-story or much in the way of chemistry with her co-stars (rumours of her affair with Gyllenhaal, with whom she never appears onscreen, to the contrary). It seems a kind of cynical casting: either the producers didn’t trust that audiences would sit through a political film without some major star wattage, or, worse, that they wouldn’t sympathize with the story of a brown-skinned man being tortured unless his wife was as American as apple pie.
Rendition screens at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 7 and 8.
Rachel Giese writes about arts for CBCNews.ca.
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