Review: Redacted

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While some reactionary observers who haven’t seen “Redacted” have labeled Brian DePalma’s latest film such calumnies as “arthouse snuff-porn,” there is at least the courage of his anger, which brings this rapid-fire, if indifferently written and acted, montage to a consistent boil. There are levels of staging and acting and phoniness and fear that work despite shortcomings. There are esthetic and moral qualms present in almost every frame of DePalma’s fictional multimedia sketch of crimes committed in the American occupation of Iraq; his fury seethes. (It’s hard to believe a 67-year-old man, born on September 11, who committed the dreary “Black Dahlia” to celluloid, made this.) “Redacted” is ready blog-bait for those paid by conservative charities to blow hard. Yet the movie is not anti-American, it’s anti-simplification, anti-stupidity, anti-terror, anti-rape, anti-war. When his lumpen characters—admittedly caricatured—are faced with encroaching paranoid around them, their lives turn full metal Jekyll. They’re casualties of warmongering. Drawing on all manner of media he’d assembled—video diaries, European television documentaries, American TV coverage, websites, terror videos—DePalma discovered the legalities are too deep on the ground, and that he could only make his own representation of what he’d observed and collected—he couldn’t mix and match fact with fiction. This led to the spat with his financier-distributors involving a montage of photographs at the end, in which faces had to be blacked out—redacted, redux. Of course, he was also part of the 1960s generation inspired by faux-vérité like Jim McBride’s piss-take, “The Diary of David Holzman.” (The D.I. of David Holzman?) There are many striking cross-references about the nature of representation, including the faux French documentary using slow zooms in and out with Kubrick-style classical accompaniment, a jab at the higher esthetic pretensions of the fictional crew. A character unwittingly paraphrases Godard, “24-7, the camera doesn’t lie.” (Godard observed, “Film is truth 24 frames a second.”) I’m not against some of the blunt elements either: a pacifist character named “Brix” or the most corpulent and corrupt of the characters being named “Rush”: DePalma’s satirical cards are on the table. This is the kind of fierce, focused fire-and-brimstone cacophony DePalma ought to have spent his late career making instead of the stately smear of “Dahlia.” Still, I’d be curious to read the reactions to “Redacted” of filmmakers who sweated bullets to make documentaries like “War Tapes,” “Fragments of Iraq” and “Gunner Palace.” I’m sure they have their points, too, and far more telling ones than the pained groans of professional sob sisters like the Bill O’Reillys of the media. 89m. (Ray Pride)