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'Rendition'

Rating:

BY JAN STUART.jan.stuart@newsday.com

October 19, 2007

The film industry has sold so many millions of tickets over the decades exploiting torture and maiming as entertainment, one may be forgiven for greeting its occasional displays of soul-searching with an attack of cynicism.

In the case of "Rendition," a foaming indictment of the U.S. government's "extraordinary rendition" policy of exporting suspected terrorists to foreign prisons without legal recourse, cynicism is matched by chagrin. Combining an all-star cast with yet another roaming, everyone-is-connected scenario that elliptically folds back on itself, a la "Crash" and "Babel," it reduces issues of burning domestic urgency to a rubble of burnt melodrama.

Written by debuting screenwriter Kelley Sane, "Rendition" launches with a suicide bombing that wipes out 19 mostly local innocents in a crowded city square. It is indicative of Sane's calculated lack of nuance that he situates this tragedy in a generic "North Africa," that all-purpose foreign hothouse where terror lurks at every souk corner.

One of the tragedy's victims is the colleague of Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal), a pencil-pushing CIA analyst who is instantly pressed into a new role to investigate. The suspected terrorist is a longtime American resident named Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), an Egyptian-born chemical engineer who is hooded and spirited away from a Washington airport en route to returning home to his family after a speaking engagement in Cape Town.

Inflamed by the loss of his colleague and a first-timer's sense of mission, Freeman watches in tacit silence (but increasing skepticism, of course) as Anwar is subjected to a succession of tortures. The brutal interrogation is conducted by the doctrinaire prison head, Abasi Fawal (Igal Naor), who has been given a green light to go to town by Corinne Whitman, the Cruella de Vil of the CIA (Meryl Streep, sporting don't-mess-with-me spectacles and an insinuating Southern accent).

While Fawal does his worst to the naked and presumably innocent engineer, Ibrahimi's pregnant wife, Isabella (Reese Witherspoon), pursues answers from an old high-school flame (Peter Sarsgaard) working as an aide to a connected U.S. senator (Alan Arkin). Meanwhile, back in North Africa, Fawal's daughter, beautiful Fatima (Zineb Oukach), kisses in the shadows with her clandestine and equally comely lover Khalid (Moa Khouas).

Why the romantic subplot from "The King and I?" You needn't ask. Sane connects every dot with wide-tipped Magic Marker ink, while director Gavin Hood (of the overwrought Oscar-winner "Tsotsi") provides the visual italics. (When Khalid shows Fatima a photo of his absent, sullen-looking brother, it practically jumps off the screen and screams "radical Islamist mug shot.")

"Rendition" gives us all the emotional money shots one might expect from such a scenario, from the in-your-face torture scenes to the anguished confrontation between the about-to-break-water Mrs. Ibrahimi and the icy bureaucrat Whitman. Why, by the by, are the prevailing antiterrorism strategems of predominantly male neo-cons being fed to us through the celluloid mouthpiece of a female CIA agent?

With a cautious eye trained on political even-handedness and legal self-protection, Sane's script credits the Clinton administration with the authorship of extraordinary rendition while avoiding the B, C and G words (Bush, Cheney and Gonzales), saying merely that, after 9/11, the dubious policy "took on a whole new life." New life, indeed. "Rendition" is one of those worthy but ultimately patronizing topical movies that makes one wish its actors had forsaken the acting op, for a change, and taken out a full-page, public-policy advertisement instead.

RENDITION (R). Baldly manipulative political thriller about a foreign born U.S. resident (Omar Metwally) erroneously implicated in a terrorist bombing. Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, Reese Witherspoon, Alan Arkin, Peter Sarsgaard play the Americans, ugly and otherwise. Gavin Hood directs. 2:02 (torture/violence and language). At area theaters.