Film Reviews	Render Unto Caesar, & Sometimes to Foreign Torturers: Rendition by George Sax

Reese Witherspoon in "Rendition."

The other day, the New York Times’ lead article was about a couple of hitherto secret US Justice Department memoranda from 2005 which sought to justify prisoner interrogation methods much of the rest of the world calls torture. President Bush responded to this report by flatly declaring, “This government does not torture people.”

The very day I read that I saw Rendition, in which Meryl Streep, playing a cooly amoral, self-sure CIA counterterrorism official, impatiently tells a doubtful junior employee, “The United States does not torture!”

As it happens, this government doesn’t always employ these questionable methods on terrorist suspects and others who are deemed uncooperative. Sometimes such prisoners are “rendered” overseas to accommodating countries where the regimes aren’t encumbered by obnoxious journalistic investigators, human rights inquiries, political opposition or sharp concerns about international conventions prohibiting such treatment of prisoners.

Rendition is a mostly taut and sometimes disturbing fictionalized portrayal of one such case. The individual at its center is Anwar (Omar Methally, in a compelling portrait of a trapped, terrified unfortunate), an Egyptian-born engineer, who, as the film begins, is returning to the States from a professional conference in South Africa. He never makes it to his Midwestern home.

At Kennedy Airport in New York he is intercepted by federal agents who question him about a shadowy Mideast terrorist named Rashid, alleged to have placed calls to Anwar’s phone. When he professes his ignorance and innocence, he is shipped off, blindfolded and shackled, to a hellish fate in a North African prison.

When his pregnant wife (Reese Witherspoon) tries to find out what happened to him, she is met with bureaucratic disinformation and denials. Finally, she turns to an old friend (Peter Sarsgaard) who is now an important aide to a hard-nosed liberal senator (Alan Arkin) with oversight responsibilities for intelligence programs. (There are hints that this friend is a rejected beau with a lingering resentment toward his former rival.)

And in that North African city where Anwar is being held, Douglas, the junior CIA man (Jake Gyllenhaal), is becoming more uncomfortable in his role as a passively complicit observer of the brutally harsh interrogation. (The filmmakers discreetly, if awkwardly, remain silent about just what country he’s in. Could it be Egypt, a US ally that’s been very cooperative in these matters, and for a long time received the second-largest amount of US economic aid?)

Douglas is involved as the result of a virtual battlefield promotion. He’s really only a young behind-the-scenes CIA analyst pressed into service when he survives unhurt a bomb blast that kills the agent assigned to the case.

Already uncomfortable in his new position, Douglas begins to recoil at what he perceives as the savage and ineffective methods of the senior police official in charge of the interrogation. But he is powerless to intervene, as he’s reminded more than once. Douglas is presumably supposed to function as a conscience-pricked audience surrogate, but he isn’t really enough of a presence in the film to promote this implicit identification effectively. Part of the reason for this must be the film’s relatively large number of important characters who compete for our attention.

Gavin Hood (Tsotsi), a South African whose first American feature this is, and writer Kelley Sane have worked to keep Rendition from becoming an expensive version of a television docudrama. The film contains significant complications, especially a competing and convergent story line involving the police official’s daughter, and a time-bending structural device that dupes the audience. (I was ambivalent about this.)

Hood does a creditable job keeping the complex vehicle in motion while registering its political points and moral implications with dramatic force. But Rendition may be a rare contemporary movie that could stand to be a little longer. It resolves its events with approximate closure, if scarcely a resounding triumph or real comfort, but perhaps a little too neatly and hurriedly.

Real life has imparted a credibility to the movie’s depiction. Those who are inclined to doubt this need look no further than Toronto, the former home of Maher Arar, a Syrian native and Canadian citizen who, in September of 2003, was detained at Kennedy when he tried to board a plane headed to Toronto, and sent to Syria, where he was brutalized and imprisoned for almost a year.

The head of Canada’s RCMP resigned over the Mounties’ cooperation with the American authorities and his government gave Arar $10 million in recompense.

The Bush administration has refused to provide Canada with the case information it requested. Arar is still barred from entering this country.