Brian de Palma's righteous retread

I'm one of those hopeful romantics when it comes to Brian de Palma. Like Terry Gilliam, he has underdog cache and a track record of some noteable hits amongst his bloated misses that still fuel my optimism with every new film. I really liked 'Black Dahlia', and so, with cautious enthusiam, I bought my ticket for his New York Film Festival screening of 'Redacted' last Thursday.

'Redacted' is a competently told story about troops on the ground in Iraq, numbed by the daily grind, who incite a number of violent acts and are victim to exponential retribution from the locals. That's the plot, but what the film is actually about is how the news media and communication technology in general has merged with the act of war to the extent that the passive audience is as culpable as the soldiers in the field. Passivity is condemned, but positive action is futile.

While that theme is not so terrible in itself, I was viewing 'Redacted' in the context of having recently subjected myself to Michael Haneke's "Funny Games" (1997). Rendered with all the subtlety of a ransom note, 'Games' is an obnoxiously smug rumination on the audience's guilt by association with violence as depicted in film (and presumably, by extension, in other media). The film is weighed down by its own belligerent arrogance, and by a moral self-righteousness that is utterly counter-productive. Haneke here is a filmmaker on the offensive, with the audience as the object of his contempt.

De Palma, on the other hand, is more interested in the characters in his story (not to mention the actors portraying them), and with the new communication technologies that permeate the world so very distant from that of the first telling of this combat rape story, his Vietnam centered 'Casualties of War' (1989). As one of the weaker aspects of the story, de Palma's use of the internet (news media video streaming, insurgent snuff movies, YouTube diatribe from self-righteous teenager) is a brute-force insertion of contextual information that doesn't always add to the core narrative. Without the window dressing, 'Redacted' is not so much an inspired re-interpretation of his Vietnam text, but a digitally re-packaged rehash of old, familiar material. Worse, the horrific events portrayed in the film never resonated more than they shocked. The fact that the troops themselves are at best 'archetypal' and at worst, ethnic stereotypes (and I consider good-old-boys from the mid-west an ethnic minority), brings nothing new to the scenario. The audience is instead encouraged to make cozy assumptions about how soldiers who lack formal education and economic opportunity are the cause of aggravated sexual assault and pre-meditated murder in foreign territories.

Regardless, the audience's patience is rewarded by a brutal closing montage of Iraqi civilian war casualties, themselves redacted (allegedly because of legal panic from the executive producers at 2929 - see the YouTube clip and decide for yourself if this is honest disagreement or viral marketing at its most insidious). Except for the final image - the teenage girl whose rape and murder is the centerpiece of the film. The censored pictures leading up to this aggressively placed and beautifully photographed fresh corpse is nothing short of assault on the audience. On that level it's a very effective film.

But as sensational and trite as de Palma might be considered as a storyteller, he is not the self-righteous goon Haneke is. De Palma sincerely wants you to feel the same outrage he does, and, in this allegedly censored version he himself decries, that very shock and outrage could not possibly be more effectively communicated.