Garrett Jones, Staff Reporter
Imagine walking off a plane after an 18 hour flight from Cape Town, South Africa to Washington D.C. Imagine being on the way to Customs told of an emergency phone call.
Then imagine being abducted by unknown assailants and flown half way around the world to be tortured for non-possessed information.
That was the experience of Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), the central focus in the movie Rendition.
The plot revolved around the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) attempts to stop terrorist activity and the methods with which it went about its mission. In this case, they used a technique called “Extraordinary Rendition”.
In the film it was explained that it was a practice started under Bill Clinton’s presidential administration where suspected terrorists were covertly extricated from the United States of America to be tortured and questioned for information regarding their terrorist affiliates.
It was also explained that after 9/11, Extraordinary Rendition “took on a life of its own” and became a justifiable practice in light of the heightened sense of national security.
However, in the film, there were those who did not agree with this practice. First and foremost was El-Ibrahimi’s wife, Isabelle (Reese Witherspoon) who was trying to search for the truth.
The government told her that her husband was never on the flight and had never left South Africa. Isabelle was able to prove otherwise; she had a printed list tracking her husband’s credit card purchases that showed him paying 70 dollars on In-Flight Duty Free.
Isabelle contacted a friend of hers from college, Allen Smith (Peter Sarsgaard), who was an assistant to a prominent senator. She asked Smith to help her find her husband. He did his best to help, despite the numerous setbacks put in place by an uncooperative CIA Deputy Director portrayed with iron-clad resolve by Meryl Streep.
Rendition is easily one of the best films of the fall season. It incites strong emotional reaction from the audience from the very first scene.
In the stadium seating auditorium at Monterey’s Century Cinemas, patrons found themselves connecting with Anwar, and they sympathized with his plight during every scene in which he was tortured for information that he certainly did not possess.
Omar Metwally, the actor playing El-Ibrahimi, gave a sobering performance, and it was angering to watch him get punched and beaten, electrocuted, and suffocated.
Witherspoon’s performance as El-Ibrahimi’s wife was equally captivating. She showed true concern for her husband, and it didn’t seem like she was acting.
However, what was lacking was a strong performance by Jake Gyllenhaal as CIA analyst Douglas Freeman; the actor was given third billing for the film, and was hardly seen in it.
Freeman was the agent assigned to observe El-Ibrahimi’s interrogation. During most of the film, he seemed emotionally and to some extent mentally detached from what was going on and reflected on what he watched by drinking copious amounts of alcohol to push the images from his head.
Freeman’s most emotive moment came about during the film when he was left alone to question El-Ibrahimi. El-Ibrahimi, out of anger and despair began hurling profanity at Freeman, who overreacted by grabbing El-Ibrahimi by the throat in hopes of choking the information from the captive.
For the most part, the film was very well done. Director, Gavin Hood (Tsotsi, 2006) did a very good job of focusing on the characters and their environments to tell a good story.
The cinematography was excellent as well. The scenes inside the dungeon in which El-Ibrahimi was tortured were dark, grimy, and the lighting of the film accentuated the dingy, decrepit, and dangerous space in which the captive found himself for two weeks of his life.
That, along with outdoor scenes of the Middle East (which were arid and hot, even to the audience) contrasted against the more cozy, if not elegant, structures of Washington D.C. when Isabelle was trying to find as much information about El-Ibrahimi’s disappearance as she and Allen could muster.
Overall, actors’ performances, coupled with a terrific script written by Kelley Sane proved to be the necessary facet for such a gem as Rendition. Like the CIA agents that appear out of the woodwork to abduct El-Ibrahimi for interrogation, this film made a quiet entrance and made a very stand-out debut.
Rendition
Starring: Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal
Director: Gavin Hood
Rated: R
Grade: A
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