Truth of the Matter

Brian De Palma's Redacted shows war imagery because the media won't.

by Cindy Fuchs

Recommended

TROOPS, I DID IT AGAIN: Redacted echoes back to De Palma's earlier Casualties of War. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

"Welcome to the oven," narrates Pfc. Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), "aka Camp Carolina, our home away from home in this godforsaken country." He notes the stench, shoots the barracks and calls to his buddies to smile as he turns the camera on them. He means to keep a "war diary," he says, a sure ticket into film school. His early footage is all about his fellow troops, their complaints and arguments, their naïveté and arrogance and their movie-typicality.

They've all seen this movie before, and respond with suspicion: Where bookish Gabe (Kel O'Neill) protests the filming ("If you have a camera, you're part of the media, and we're under strict orders not to talk to the media"), moralistic McCoy (Rob Devaney) pulls out his own camera, saying, "The first casualty of this entire conflict, it's gonna be the truth."

With these brief exchanges, the primary argument of Brian De Palma's Redacted is abundantly clear. It's not just that the war is bad, based on lies or turning young troops into confused victims or traumatized killers, but the media has lost any semblance of integrity in their reporting. And if that story is not precisely news, De Palma's version arrives in theaters preceded by debates over the very possibilities of war imagery being true, representative or patriotic. Such concerns stemmed from the film's inspiration, a 2006 case in which American troops in Mahmoudiya, Iraq, raped a schoolgirl and then murdered her and her family.

De Palma's "fictional documentary" assembles a range of materials — a somber "French-made" documentary, Western and Iraqi news imagery, clips from Arabic Internet sites, as well as night-visioned shots of the rape by Angel's buddies, Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman) and Flake (Patrick Carroll). There's never a moment when these two aren't brutish and ignorant, even when they unnerve while working checkpoints or show genuine upset at the death of their gruff master sergeant (Ty Jones).

These portraits call to mind the thugs who made up the squad in De Palma's Casualties of War, in which U.S. troops kidnap, rape and murder a Vietnamese girl during that war. Where Sean Penn's performance went a long way toward complicating that horror, Redacted is hampered by awkward acting and obvious point-making. Still, the final sequence of photos of actual bodies is stunning, whether you see the studio's "redacted" (faces-blurred) version or the director's edit, faces clear. Death is its own truth, all too visible.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)

Redacted

Directed by Brian De Palma

A Magnolia Pictures release