Venice International Film Festival

VENICE, Italy -- Veteran director Brian De Palma's filmmaking skills have seldom been as razor sharp as they are in his sensational new film about members of a U.S. Army squad who rape and murder a 15-year-old Iraqi girl and slay her family.

Made on HD video and employing images from digital cameras, video recorders, Internet uploads and old-fashioned film, De Palma's movie is a ferocious argument against the engagement in Iraq for what it is doing to everyone involved.

Made so expertly that it appears to be assembled from genuine footage, the film details the extraordinary psychological pressure suffered by young soldiers on checkpoint duty in occupied areas of Iraq, and then follows one unit as two of its members skew monstrously out of control.
De Palma's screenplay is outstanding, and he draws wonderfully naturalistic performances from his youthful cast. Sympathetic to the young men who lose their way in horrible circumstances but unflinching in its depiction of the horrors that can result, the film is harrowing, but it should find responsive audiences everywhere.

A fictional story based on real events, "Redacted" distills images from an array of sources to tell its story, beginning with those captured by Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), a young soldier who hopes they will buy his way into film school. Clean-cut Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney) also wields a video camera, but Salazar goes to extremes making a daily record of almost everything he sees.

That includes conversations with the other guys in the unit: Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll), a doper whose name is apt; B.B. Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman), a blowhard with a lot of body fat; Gabe Blix (Kel O'Neill), who likes to read John O'Hara; and two sergeants, Sweet (Ty Jones) and Vazques (Mike Figueroa). They goof around for the camera off duty and Salazar even records them on duty so that when one of them is blown to pieces by a bomb left in roadside trash, he gets it all.

By then, footage from a French documentary about the unit has made clear how the monotony and constant fear of maintaining checkpoints grinds the men down. Constantly being told they have to remain on duty for a further tour, they are drained and on edge. The docu reports that over 24 months 2,000 Iraqis were killed at checkpoints with only 60 proven to be insurgents. In one such incident, a pregnant woman and her baby are killed when her brother, taking her to the hospital, races through the unit's checkpoint thinking he's been waved on.

Rush and Flake are especially vulnerable to demonizing an enemy that they don't recognize or understand. Their plan to rape the daughter of a Sunni man recently arrested comes up almost idly but then becomes one of deadly intent.

De Palma uses all his considerable talent to make clear what has happened to these young men and the performances, especially by Carroll as the callously indifferent Flake and Devaney as the conscience stricken McCoy, are first rate.

The director makes great use of Handel's "Sarabande" in the picture, the somber tones familiar as the main title music in Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon." It's a reminder that nothing depicted in this film is new and that it's a shame it needs to be told again.

The bullet veers far off the mark in Brian De Palma's "Redacted." Deeply felt but dramatically unconvincing "fictional documentary" -- inspired by the March 2006 rape and killings by U.S. troops in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad -- has almost nothing new to say about the Iraq situation and can't make up its mind about how to package its anger in an alternative cinematic form. HD-lensed item, largely using thesps with legit experience, feels more like a filmed Off Broadway play than a docudrama, and has trouble establishing a consistent dramatic tone. Curio biz looks likeliest for this Magnolia release Stateside.
From its title and intriguing opening (which shows words blacked out on a document by a censor's pen), the film seems determined to explore the repackaging of actual events by official and corporate media. In fact, it does nothing of the kind. From the first sequence, of Latino grunt Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) recording his buddies on video camera for a docu ("Tell Me No Lies") he hopes will get him into film school, "Redacted" is much more about the process and techniques of filmmaking than media distortion or coverups.

The breezy Salazar's fellow soldiers in Alfa Company, Camp Carolina, Samarra, fall into the usual stereotypes: bookish Gabe Blix (Kel O'Neill), who spends his time reading John O'Hara's "Appointment in Samarra"; soldier-with-a-conscience McCoy, a lawyer (Rob Devaney); and racist tree-swingers B.B. Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman) and Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll). Their leader, Master Sgt. James Sweet (Ty Jones), is a motormouth hardass on his third tour of duty.

It's soon clear De Palma intends to construct the whole movie from "found footage" -- Salazar's vid diary, security camera tapes, an Arab TV channel, websites (both U.S. and Islamic fundamentalist) or other docus and testimonials.

After Salazar's opening, the first of these sources to show the outfit going about its daily routine at a checkpoint is a (fake) French docu, "Barrage." Complete with Baroque music, finely shot closeups and a metaphysical commentary -- as different from Salazar's raw, emotional footage as possible -- it's unclear whether De Palma is parodying Gallic documentary style for its artiness or praising it for its detachment. Whichever is true, pic's technique is already starting to deflect attention from any potential message.

Drama finally clicks into gear when a car driven by Iraqis doesn't stop at the checkpoint, and Flake and Rush open fire. Even when it turns out the car contains a pregnant woman rushing to get to a hospital (where she subsequently dies), the two soldiers remain unrepentant. In dialogue that sounds too theatrically scripted, Rush contends, "You can't afford remorse. You get remorse, you get weak; you get weak, you die."Violence escalates when the locals take revenge on one of the group, in a well-staged shock sequence. After a night raid on a private house, seen from the p.o.v. of an embedded journalist, and the subsequent media hoo-ha, Flake and Rush pressure the rest of their group to return on a private mission. Secretly helmet-cammed by Salazar, this ends in the horrific rape of a 15-year-girl and the shooting of her and her family.

Shot in half-shadow amid general hysteria, this sequence does have a raw power, but its impact is diluted by the pic's increasingly wobbly tone and the characters' lack of depth. Dialogue simply checks off issues rather than developing arguments, and there isn't the faintest trace of any moral or ethical complexity visible onscreen.

De Palma the technician and film buff too often gets in the way of De Palma the filmmaker with a cause. And there's little here that he didn't already say in "Casualties of War," with which "Redacted" shares several character and story parallels.

Ironically, pic's most powerful section is its final 10 minutes, as McCoy's traumatic experience is reduced, back home, to a bar yarn that ends with friends cheering him as a hero. De Palma follows that with a photo montage of real-life Iraqi victims of violence, dubbed "Collateral Damage" -- a harrowing couple of minutes that seems, alas, to be a coda to a better picture than "Redacted."

Performances are of a piece with the material, with a slightly overplayed quality that's more suitable to legit than docudrama. Locations in Amman, Jordan, do reasonable service for Iraq. Rest of technical package is high-quality HD level.

VENICE, Italy -- Paul Haggis has not only avoided the dreaded sophomore slump, but the director and co-writer of the Oscar-winning "Crash" has returned with another bona-fide contender.

Ostensibly a murder-mystery set against the backdrop of the war in Iraq, "In the Valley of Elah" is a deeply reflective, quietly powerful work that is as timely as it is moving.

Further graced by an exceptional Tommy Lee Jones lead performance that would have to be considered one of the finest in the 60-year-old actor's career, the Warner Independent release is getting a little preliminary festival exposure at Venice and Toronto before opening in limited engagements on Sept. 14.

Strong word-of-mouth should ensure that the film plays well into awards season.
For those not up on their Old Testament, "In the Valley of Elah" refers to the place where David slew Goliath. It's an apt metaphor for the battle undertaken by Jones, as a grieving father fighting his way through a bureaucratic quagmire in search of the truth, and by the young men and women who are facing insurmountable odds of emerging physically and/or emotionally unscathed from an increasingly controversial conflict.

Jones' Hank Deerfield is a former military MP who receives a call that his son, Mike (Jonathan Tucker, in flashbacks) has gone AWOL after returning from active duty in Iraq. When the elder Deerfield shows up in Albuquerque, N.M., to conduct his own personal investigation, it's subsequently discovered that his son has been a victim of foul play.

In his efforts to find out what really happened, Hank initially butts heads with Emily Sanders (a no-nonsense Charlize Theron), a recently promoted police detective who is fighting a couple of battles of her own -- against the close-knit military brass, and for respect from her colleagues, who make unsubtle intimations about her relationship with her boss (Josh Brolin).

As Hank stubbornly soldiers on, Emily eventually lends her support. As the two begin to piece together the events that led up to Mike's disappearance, Hank is also forced to take stock of his own belief system.

In part an adaptation of a Playboy magazine article by Mark Boal called "Death and Dishonor," the Haggis version is an eloquently written portrait of a man clinging to logic during a time of confusion and turmoil.

With equal amounts bravado, anguish and, ultimately, remorse filling the crevices of his world-weary visage, Jones never has been better; Theron also effectively portrays the multifaceted dimensions of a single mother and small-town detective whose tough exterior conceals a considerable amount of vulnerable self-doubt.

Making the most of the few scenes she has, Susan Sarandon is affecting as Jones' dutiful wife, while Frances Fisher does likewise as a topless bartender who provides Jones with some valuable leads.

Production values are equally accomplished, from cinematographer Roger Deakins' stirring visual compositions to production designer Laurence Bennett's tarnished Americana to Mark Isham's achingly poignant, string-laden score.

In the Valley of Elah
By ROBERT KOEHLER
Charlize Theron helps Tommy Lee Jones investigate the death of his son, an Iraq war vet, in writer-director Paul Haggis' 'In the Valley of Elah.'

A Warner Independent Pictures release presented in association with Nala Films, Summit Entertainment, Samuels Media, of a Blackfriar's Bridge production. Produced by Patrick Wachsberger, Steven Samuels, Darlene Caamano Loquet, Paul Haggis, Laurence Becsey. Executive producers, Stan Wlodkowski, David Garrett, Erik Feig, James Holt, Emilio Diez Barroso, Bob Hayward. Co-producers, Dana Maksimovich, Deborah Rennard. Directed, written by Paul Haggis; story, Mark Boal, Haggis.

Hank Deerfield - Tommy Lee Jones
Det. Emily Sanders - Charlize Theron
Lt. Kirklander - Jason Patric
Joan Deerfield - Susan Sarandon
Sgt. Dan Carnelli - James Franco
Arnold Bickman - Barry Corbin
Chief Buchwald - Josh Brolin
Evie - Frances Fisher
Cpl. Steve Penning - Wes Chatham
Spc. Gordon Bonner - Jake McLaughlin

The Iraq war has proven as nettlesome to Hollywood moviemakers as it has to Washington policymakers, and "In the Valley of Elah" continues the trend. Working overtime to be an important statement on domestic dissatisfaction with the war and the special price paid by vets and their families, Paul Haggis' follow-up to "Crash" is too self-serious to work as a straight-ahead whodunit and too lacking in imagination to realize its art-film aspirations. Lightning probably won't strike twice for Haggis, with prestigious fall festival premieres unlikely to translate into strong domestic cash flow for Warner Independent, though foreign returns could be brighter.
At its heart, "Elah's" storytelling (inspired from a true story first reported by Mark Boal in Playboy) is the stuff of a James Patterson thriller rather than a grandly elegiac reading of one father's tragedy. Unwilling to opt for the pulp-trash excesses of such military thrillers as "The General's Daughter," the film ends up delivering a poorly conceived message of alarm, bluntly signaling that the war is causing America's sons and daughters severe psychological damage.It also continues a line of recent movies addressing the first Gulf War ("Jarhead") and the current one ("Home of the Brave," "Grace Is Gone") that fail to capture the realities of war experience and familial angst beyond basic truisms and pictorial surfaces.A former Vietnam vet, retired Army sergeant and Tennessee truck-hauler, Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) receives a call from Fort Rudd that his son Mike (Jonathan Tucker) is missing, though his unit is back from Iraq. Without having even a modest discussion with long-suffering wife Joan (Susan Sarandon), Hank drives to the New Mexico base to glean more information and hopefully reunite with his son. When Hank arrives, he finds that Mike's unit buddies are keeping mum and base officers like Lt. Kirklander (Jason Patric) and Sgt. Carnelli (James Franco) are little more than bureaucrat lackeys with little interest in the case.

Hank gradually earns the respect of one of the local civilian cops in neighboring Bradford, Det. Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), informing her that Mike "has been bringing democracy to a shithole ... (and) deserves more than this." Not one for subtlety, Haggis ensures that Emily is not only the only woman in her department, forever marginalized by her male colleagues, but that she's also a single mom to a cute boy (Devin Brochu).

When a murder scene appears to be on the borderline between Army and local jurisdictions, the locals -- except increasingly suspicious Emily -- are willing to hand it over to the MPs for investigation.

The film awkwardly shifts between Hank's emotional realities -- as he watches some disturbing vid clips recovered from Mike's cell phone -- and a cycle of fairly obvious red herrings. One, involving Mike's unit buddy Robert (Victor Wolf), consumes an inordinate amount of running time, and is amounts to a one-dimensional portrayal of American-style bigotry.

While taciturn Hank, a man of so few words that he verges on being mean, cold and heartless, busts a few heads on his way to getting answers, Emily doggedly gets into extended verbal tussles with every authority figure in sight, from Kirklander to her immediate boss, police chief Buchwald (Josh Brolin).

Much of this is woefully familiar in dramatic terms, but viewers may find welcome distractions in cinematographer Roger Deakins' grandly panoramic widescreen visions of a contemporary American West -- emphasizingthe barrenness of the places people live and work -- as well as Jones' laser-focused performance, which is almost radical in its deliberately hardened flatness. As integral and crucial as each piece is to pic, both Deakins and Jones operate in worlds of their own, almost intimidating in their individual power and concentration. Theron gamely works hard to match Jones on screen, but her perf recalls the thankless roles so many of George C. Scott's many co-stars had to settle for. While vet thesps like Patric, Sarandon and Brolin come and go (even the superb Frances Fisher, as a topless barkeep, feels underused), rookie actor and Iraq vet Jake McLaughlin has a few exceptional scenes with Jones that impressively suggest a hidden world of hurt.

Most production departments, particularly Laurence Bennett's site-specific production design, are solid, though considerably less of Mark Isham's plodding and glum score would have been more; ditto some of the song choices (including a closer by Annie Lennox). Odd title, which will surely be a commercial impediment, alludes to the Israeli location of the biblical battle between David and Goliath.