Interview. Brian De Palma.

"Brian De Palma is one of cinema's most hypnotic stylists, a virtuoso whose multilayered tracking shots can expand your perception of space, time, and motion onscreen; so it's a major statement when he throws away his jazzy technique and goes for something rough-hewn and immediate," writes David Edelstein in New York.

And that's precisely what he's done in Redacted, "a controversial film, a fictionalized portrait of real-life war crime in the current Iraq occupation, which De Palma has made more provocative by using the techniques of non-fiction filmmaking, TV news reporting, video diaries, and propaganda pieces to challenge audiences to question what exactly they're seeing," notes Sean Axmaker, introducing his interview with the director.

Updated through 11/18.

"The movie is a grimly mischievous emblem of our media-blitzed world," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "Redacted takes all kinds of risks, and so it's perhaps not surprising that it has already been charged with fomenting anti-Americanism, or that De Palma himself has been accused of exploitation. But the movie explores an issue that has been debated for years, by Susan Sontag, among others - the morality of visual representations of atrocity - and it comes off as the opposite of exploitation."

Back to David Edelstein for a moment: "[I]s it unpatriotic to point out that soldiers on their third tours of duty in a place where they have little knowledge of the culture, where they can't tell who is on their side and who wants to blow them up, stand a good chance of losing both their moral compass and their minds?"

Earlier: Reviews, lots of 'em, from NYFF, Toronto and Venice.

Updates, 11/13: "The level of invention is so impressive in Redacted, and its rebuttal of Hollywood's narrative model so uncompromising, that it pains me to say the film is rarely convincing," writes Ryan Gilbey in a piece for the New Statesman focusing on the hurdles none of the Iraq war movies have yet leapt.

For Stephanie Zacharek, Redacted "is the messiest, most confounding picture about the Iraq war that has yet been made. It's also possibly the most direct, and the most potentially upsetting." She talks with De Palma for Salon.

"Opening amid a momentary lull in public antipathy for Bush's war - attributable to an otherwise incompetent administration's sensational ability to repress images and control the story - Redacted has been variously attacked as arty, cartoonish, and even overly familiar," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "One might similarly characterize Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib paintings; earlier this year, Philip Haas's noir analysis The Situation was dismissed in comparable terms. But whatever their temperaments, Botero, Haas, and De Palma are fashioning something other than propaganda. Redacted wasn't made to change your mind, but to unburden De Palma's."

"If Redacted were a well-intentioned artistic miscalculation, that would be one thing - but unfortunately its heart as well as mind and technique doesn't always seem to be in the right place," writes Dennis Harvey at SF360. "As scenarist (seldom his strongpoint), De Palma creates one-dimensional stereotypes his no-name actors are hapless to flesh out.... Memo to Brian De Palma: Exercise your politics via checkbook and at the polls. Leave the screen commentary to more cogent thinkers."

Updates, 11/14: "The result of this grand, subversive and infuriatingly erratic talent trying at long last to recapture the youthful vigor of his earliest piss-and-vinegar, take-no-prisoners, underground Vietnam-era satires Greetings and Hi, Mom!, Redacted is at once both outraged and outrageous," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "It's a low-budget, angry-as-fuck provocation—and something of a call to arms from an embittered old man who saw us going down this very same road many years ago, and desperately hates that he can still remember how it worked out the last time around. Too bad Redacted is also kind of lousy."

"[I]t's the year's most subversive American film," argues Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine. "At a time when the Democratic candidates for president are debating whether to invade Iran or Pakistan next, De Palma steadfastly insists that there's no such thing as a just war."

The Boston Phoenix's Gerald Peary listens to De Palma defend his film in Toronto.

"Redacted aims to blame us all for the horrors of war, saying in its meta-narrative way that we're all swept up in the same hypocritical web that makes us into passive and voyeuristic hyenas," writes Chris Barsanti for Film Journal International. "While it's a fair point, when the director threw a tantrum after Magnolia blacked out the faces of the real Iraqi people who appear in the photo montage that ends the film (an admirable desire to conceal the civilians' identities), it became clear that this film is just one more strand in that same web."

Online listening tip. Keith Uhlich talks with De Palma for Zoom In Online.

Online viewing tips. Wow, if you've been away from American TV for a while... Goodness. Anyway: Bill O'Reilly goes after Mark Cuban for distributing Redacted. It's quite personal, and I wouldn't be surprised if O'Reilly's angling for some sort PR-rousing tussle in the courts. Part the second.

Updates, 11/15: "Because Redacted is the first film by a major artist to address the Iraq War, its sketchiness is maddening," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "De Palma's like a kid discovering the Internet, presuming that it liberates all information, then grousing that the technology doesn't solve political or private problems. The trouble is that De Palma confuses his personal geek alarm with geopolitical concern."

The Philadelphia City Paper is pro-Redacted. Cindy Fuchs has the review and Sam Adams talks with De Palma.

Scott Foundas talks with De Palma for the LA Weekly.

"Despite some ungenerous notices from critics so far, the ensemble cast... is excellent," insists Adam Nayman in Eye Weekly. "Those who decry the acting as stagy miss how carefully the performances have been modulated to suit De Palma's rigorous formal strategies. The troupe's overbearing machismo in the moments where they know they're being filmed gets abandoned when things get candid - as in the horrific mid-film rape scene, staged from the ghostly-green POV of a hidden helmet-cam."

"While some reactionary observers who haven't seen Redacted have labeled Brian DePalma's latest film with 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," writes Ray Pride. "There are levels of staging and acting and phoniness and fear that work despite shortcomings."

Updates, 11/16: Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times: "To see Brian De Palma's Redacted is to be reminded of what a 17th century French nobleman, the Duc de Villars, famously asked Louis XIV: 'Defend me from my friends; I can defend myself from my enemies.'"

"The problem with Redacted is that the representation is an unwieldy hodgepodge of brutal naturalism and self-conscious theatricality, its potential power undermined by schematic storytelling and clumsy acting," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "What those handheld, low-definition recording devices capture is less unvarnished reality — or a persuasive simulacrum of it — than dinner theater or underrehearsed made-for-television drama.... Its formal novelty aside, Redacted rarely hits the audience with a genuine shock or a clarifying insight."

"It looks and feels cheap, knocked-out," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "As an expression of from-the-gut anti-war rage, Redacted is admirable, but as art, it's undercooked." And he, too, interviews De Palma.

"For a while, I assumed De Palma was making a pitch-black comedy - 'Barrage,' the French bit, with its mournful strings and pseudopoetic voiceover, positively garrotes a particular strain of pompous European docmaking (Varda, Ophüls, even Herzog to some degree)," writes Mike D'Angelo for Nerve. "But the joke was ultimately on me, since Redacted resorts to the same shameless pandering when it finally arrives at its tragic conclusion."

"Redacted is a metaphor for what De Palma and others believe is the fatal flaw of our Iraq strategy: You cannot enforce 'freedom' at gunpoint," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "Now that some 200,000 Iraqis have died in the war, for whatever reason and at whatever hands, it is hard to see how many of the rest would be as grateful for our presence as we are assured they are."

Watching Redacted, Noah Forrest (Movie City News) "couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps Brian De Palma was really a Republican trying to make a polemic so one-sided and trite that it would turn off most liberals."

Updates, 11/17: "Brian De Palma's Redacted is a movie that gives war criticism a bad name," writes Fred Kaplan in Slate. "It's a nasty piece of work - and not in a good way. He means to shock, but his film is merely distasteful.... Some have denounced the film as anti-American or as propaganda for al-Qaida, but that exaggerates its potency. De Palma's grist is too thin for a sophisticated terrorist's mill."

"[O]f all the war-themed pictures that have been released so far this fall, it stands apart, and it stands alone: Redacted is confrontational, rough, immediate and confounding," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "[T]he nakedness of its anger, of De Palma's anger, is its very strength. Debating its numerous problems - the weakness of some of the acting (De Palma uses a group of relatively unknown actors here), or the effusiveness of the music over the final, devastating set of images - is like critiquing an open sore. This is one of those rare pictures that's more significant for what it asks of us than for what it is."

"While in some respects this multi-point-of-view chronicle of a war crime and its burial is formally ingenious, that ingenuity is mostly conceptual, which is to say it doesn't actually play," writes Glenn Kenny in Premiere. "The problem here, which vitiates the picture's ingenuity and causes it, finally, to sink like a stone, is in the physical execution of the material."

Update, 11/18: Via Robert Cashill, a discussion at the Mobius Home Video Forum.

Posted by dwhudson at November 12, 2007 9:21 AM