Toronto and NYFF preview. Redacted.

"What [Brian] De Palma may be trying to do here - as he did in his greatest picture, the 1989 Casualties of War to which Redacted is something of a companion piece - is sharpen our moral sense into something more personal, and more cutting," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "He wants us to be informed, but he also wants to make us feel more. Compassion is worth nothing if it doesn't bleed. Over and over again in his movies, De Palma has revisited one crucial question (a question that also obsessed Alfred Hitchcock before him): What happens when human beings fail to act? Redacted is a troubling picture about the price we pay for standing still, and for not standing up."

"[T]he connection to his Vietnam movie Casualties of War seems obvious," writes Jim Emerson. "But the stronger connection, I think, is to Greetings (1968) and Hi Mom! (1970), two then-counter-cultural comedies, more influenced by Godard than Hitchcock, that toyed with our perceptions of Vietnam, terrorism, law and order, Black Power and other issues of the day as they were filtered through the mass media.... I don't know when De Palma has ever been accused of being sincere, but Redacted feels to me as close as he's ever come."

"The movie is too interesting to dismiss but too muddled to take seriously - which, come to think of it, is my reaction to virtually every De Palma movie," blogs Ben Kenigsberg for Time Out Chicago. "At least there aren’t any obvious cribs from Vertigo."

"[I]ts weaknesses should be fatal, but they're not," blogs Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "The version of Redacted that plays back in one's head resonates more than the movie that actually screened has any right to."

"De Palma wants to rankle audiences, especially those who may enter the theater anticipating some genteel, hand-wringing, good-little-liberal lament about the physical and emotional scars of wartime," blogs the LA Weekly's Scott Foundas. "Redacted is unapologetically angry and direct, and De Palma does very little to ease you into the movie. Some have suggested that this is evidence of haphazard construction, or shoddy acting by the film's largely unknown cast, but it is the entire point of Redacted that we are observing crude, found video objects, and that their subjects, aware of the camera that's recording them, assume the awkwardly self-conscious stances of people in vacation pictures and birthday-party videos."

"The tricky thing about Redacted is that a lot of what's wrong with it is, I'm convinced, intentional," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "If ever a war could use some movie-movie tricks to help audiences feel the terror, it's this one. I respect what DePalma's trying to do, but as much as it hurts to say, I just don't think it works." For his colleague Scott Tobias, all in all the film "sounds like a better idea than it turns out to be."

"In certain respects, Redacted has more in common with George Romero's Diary of the Dead than it does with the recent onslaught of documentaries harrowing the war in Iraq," writes Michael Guillén. "Both parry and thrust at the many-headed Hydra known as mainstream media coverage to demonstrate how - as soon as one lie is revealed - five more spring into place to control the spin, let alone the masses. Both turn to the democratized press of blogs and YouTube footage to texturally diversify reportage from the front. How I wish I could have sat down with Romero and DePalma at one of Toronto's ubiquitous Second Cup cafes with a videocam and a laptop to edit together today's version of the truth. Wouldn't that have been a truth and a half?"

"Redacted felt like an episode of America's Most Wanted-style cornball re-enactments," writes Mike White. "The film was like making an after school special on the Mai Lai massacre with a handful of C-List actors, a camcorder, and a script banged out the night before."

"This crap shared the Venice prize with I'm Not There. So much for the validity of juries," grumbles Howard Feinstein at Filmmaker.

Earlier: Reviews from Venice.

Posted by dwhudson at September 23, 2007 3:13 PM