Under suspicion

Reese Witherspoon stars in the political thriller Rendition. (New Line Cinema/Alliance Atlantis)

Who are these people? How did I get here? What’s happening?

Such phrases, presumably, tumble through the head of a character named Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), an Egyptian-American chemical engineer covertly deposited in a secret North African prison by the CIA. Strangely, I had the same thoughts as I sat in a theatre watching El-Ibrahimi’s story unfold, in the film Rendition. Agonizingly well intended, Rendition is one of those how-could-they-mess-it-up? messes, a film so burdened with import that it collapses. It lives a noble, purposeful life, then dies of its own urgency.

“Extraordinary rendition” is the term for the U.S. government’s practice of transporting terror suspects to foreign countries for interrogation. Since 9/11, the Bush administration has frequently used rendition, though critics prefer the term coined in an expose by the New Yorker magazine: “outsourcing torture.” Sadly, this American practice is relevant to Canadians; just ask Maher Arar. Arar came to Canada from Syria in 1987 at age 17. A dual citizen of those countries, he was stopped in New York in 2002 while flying home to Canada from a family vacation. On suspicion of an al-Qaeda connection (never proven), the U.S. government sent Arar to a Syrian prison with no counsel and no charges for one year. He was brutally tortured.

But Arar can hardly sue the screenwriter of Rendition (Kelley Sane) for appropriating his life; his extraordinary story has become painfully ordinary over time. Amnesty International and other human rights organizations have logged testimony from numerous people who survived rendition; others have simply vanished. And so the fictional, highly Hollywood-ized El-Ibrahimi is a composite of sorts: a Joe El-Average plucked from a flight between South Africa and his home of Washington for the crime of FWB (flying while brown). He is the unlucky recipient of a take-action directive ordered in the wake of a suicide bombing “over there” that killed an American. As he walks casually toward his arrival gate, he’s whisked aside by security: “Anwar El-Ibrahimi? Can you come this way, please?” It’s a grotesque image; a man’s disappearance from the crowd is as simple as a shoulder tap.

Rendition, the practice, is precisely the kind of modern event that cries out to be dramatized and known. But Rendition, the film, is strangely lethargic; the pieces of the thriller are so perfectly cut and the players so schematic that the film has no momentum. In the hands of director Gavin Hood (Tsotsi), everything is at stake, but it feels like nothing is; there’s an odd drudgery to the exercise.

Omar Metwally, centre, plays Anwar El-Ibrahimi, an Egyptian-American detained as a suspected terrorist, in Rendition. (New Line Cinema/Alliance Atlantis)

El-Ibrahimi’s wife, Isabella (Reese Witherspoon), is mother to their adorable toddler, and moments from giving birth again. Her fecundity, coupled with those winsome blond looks, would sell a rack of newspapers in about five minutes. But instead of going to the press with the disappearance of her Columbia-educated, world-renowned engineer husband, she goes to Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard), an old friend and former love who works for a senator (Alan Arkin). Smith is only vaguely motivated by altruism; mostly, he smells a political opportunity for his boss. But according to a bloodthirsty head honcho in the CIA terrorism unit, Corrinne Whitman (Meryl Streep), El-Ibrahimi has been receiving some suspicious calls on his cellphone. His may not be the watertight case the senator needs to turn rendition into an election issue.

It’s a mildly clever move putting the film’s most right-wing jargon in the mouth of Streep, that paragon of tolerance and hugginess. She gets to be The Other Side, saying things like, “There are 7,000 people in Central London who are alive tonight because of information we elicited just this way.” And yet, it’s not exactly a fair fight; next to dewy Isabella, Whitman is cold, old and phoney, only lacking a strokeable handlebar moustache as she yelps: “Put ‘im on the plane!”

The ghost plane takes El-Ibrahimi to a rat-hole basement prison in “Northern Africa” (the film’s lack of geographical specificity feels insulting). There, a newbie CIA analyst named Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) is holding court, just barely. I usually like Gyllenhaal, but either the character should have been changed to suit his Clark Kent lug looks, or the actor should have played it weaker. Or maybe they should have hired a wiry, nervous guy like Edward Norton to do the deed. Because if there’s one thing Rendition needs to convey, it’s lack of control, which is the central madness of torture. Freeman behaves like he’s affected by the atrocities he’s sanctioning (he hits the hookah pipe), but he doesn’t look changed. From the get-go, Freeman is the kind of guy who seems able to handle any situation; Gyllenhaal is just too large, too solid, too sure to wrestle with moral uncertainty. He appears to carry a fleet of personal trainers in his suitcase, so when his character says, “I’m the paper pusher, not the muscle,” you think: My God, then what does the muscle look like?

At the hands of the local chief of police (Igal Naor), El-Ibrahimi is tortured. The scenes are effective, and upsetting, and Hood slams his point home. The sight of that Abu Ghraib hood still makes the stomach twist. Valiantly, if not successfully, the script circles the question of whether or not torture breeds more violence. In a head-scratching, disjointed back story, the police chief has a daughter who becomes unwittingly involved with a group of budding terrorists. The film hints that the machine-gun-wielding boys are machines manufactured by violence for violence.

I wanted to know more about these boys, as I did almost everyone in Rendition. Hood needed to spotlight the real, live people at the centre of this political debate, but who are they? Witherspoon isn’t terrible, but she’s only stoic; her blankness doesn’t really look like fortitude. Meanwhile, jockish Freeman is suddenly quoting Shakespeare. Worse, El-Ibrahimi himself is given no complexity or ambiguity, and thus, no humanity. And without humanity, as this period of history surely shows, there’s nothing.

Rendition opens across Canada on Oct.  19.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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