Movie Review: Redacted

Radically different from the usual Brian DePalma jaunt, Redacted is most shocking for its attempt at its pseudo-documentary style. One will be hard pressed to find any homage to Eisenstein or Hitchcock here, where the director uses digital video to create a non-linear, voyeuristic narrative on the Iraq war, making Redacted one of the filmmakers most experimental works, albeit one of his least successful.

Following the video-diaries of a group of U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq, Redacted uses recreated accounts of American troops to highlight their boredom, their frustration and most importantly, their atrocities. Focusing on the real life rape and murder of a fifteen-year-old Iraqi girl at the hands of two American soldiers, Redacted fails to break free of the Aristotelian narrative structure.

Using a hodgepodge of footage to accomplish his point, it's clear that DePalma was again cribbing other filmmakers' work to fuel his own. Experimenting with the style of art-house, independent filmmakers like Henry Jaglom, who assembles the heart of his pictures' stories after shooting them, DePalma makes this loose method feel strained from his refusal to let go of the narrative structure the director has been working with for nearly half a century.

Whether you enjoy the style or not, free flowing and from the heart usually categorizes the work of Jaglom, and DePalma easily misses the point. Knowing what he wanted to accomplish with Redacted and where the story was headed sabotaged the production from the get go.

The biggest flaw plaguing Redacted is that the actors' performances seem unnatural. The manufactured acting is a direct result of DePalma trying to squeeze reality out of a Hollywood paradigm. How can you expect relatively inexperienced, young actors to emote truth when they are being forced to act within a traditional narrative structure? They aren't allowed to explore their own feelings, to find their character's stance on the subject, they merely ape DePalma's premise.

While Depalma's message and controversial content might briefly sting, ultimately it is too little, too late. For most American viewers, the pointlessness of the Iraq War and the audacities caused from the conflict are not new topics, in fact they've been the subject of countless films this year alone. DePalma offers nothing new on the subject, and Redacted will only be added to the countless box-office flops that have targeted the War in Iraq.

Likely to make audiences sick to their stomachs and bring up morality questions concerning the inaction of idle witnesses, Redacted accomplishes little else. Far from being the resonating bit of reality DePalma hoped to unearth, Redacted is highlighted by a veteran filmmaker playing with a unique style, but failing to connect with the picture's ultimate goal, truth.

-Joe Russo (www.MoviePulse.net)