According to Redacted, truth is the first casualty of war. The second casualty? The people who get raped and murdered
When it comes to media coverage of war, very seldom is the full picture ever truly revealed. Redacted is a film about the way in which war is reported and truth concealed. It is also an exploration of soldiers’ reactions to, and abuses of, the power they’re given in zones of combat.
Based on the real-life rape and murder of 14-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi at the hands of American soldiers, Redacted’s best trick is in hiding behind a veil of edited misinformation and dramatic licence. Director Brian De Palma is no stranger to antiwar filmmaking — his 1989 Vietnam War drama Casualties of War profiled a similar act of unthinkable violence. The difference, however, comes in Redacted’s time-frame of reference. While Casualties looked over a decade into the past, Redacted’s reliance on streaming Internet video clips and blog site screenshots is entirely of the here-and-now.
Redacted does falter in De Palma’s broadly sketched cast of characters, with each of the typical war-film figures in place. The artist, in this case aspiring filmmaker Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), thinks his constant video-taping of daily grunt life will guarantee him a spot in film school once his tour of duty through Iraq is finally finished. Bad seed Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll) relishes his first kill at a checkpoint bridge, a pregnant woman in labour, rushing to hospital in her brother’s car. Ganging up with dick-driven B.B. Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman), they plot the film’s centre-point rape and slaughter as some sort of revenge — something they believe they deserve after the landmine death of their master sergeant Sweet (Ty Jones). Then there’s Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney), who wants no part of his band of brothers’ disregard for military code, yet stands by on watch and does nothing to stop it. His protest comes later, uploaded to YouTube, where De Palma reportedly first heard of the real-life case he presents in somewhat altered form here.
Using largely untrained actors, De Palma’s aim towards dramatic reconstructions doesn’t always take. Occasionally clunky and overwrought, the film’s heaviest moments are often all but ruined by a sense of acting school tutorials gone wrong. Yet, in a film questioning precisely what it is we choose to believe, these flimsy characterizations work in De Palma’s favour. Do we disbelieve the story because the acting’s so cardboard? No — if anything, it makes everything even more visceral. These are real people onscreen, and these types of things have happened since America invaded Iraq.
Redacted’s central paradox — and most interesting facet — comes in its composition as a controlled (and fake) documentary, De Palma deciding what we get to see and how we see it. As a filmgoing experience, it’s not an enjoyable one. It’s annoying, aggravating and drenched in as much lame machismo as it is blood. Yet, already infamous for its closing sequence of “real photographs from the Iraq war,” many of which are either altered, re-created, or from earlier scenes of Redacted itself, De Palma at least succeeds on the most important level any work of protest art can hope to. His film spurs contemplation and discourse. In an age of misinformation and misguided military manoeuvres gone unchecked, that’s an important feat to be promoted and explored.
