"Redacted"

In "Redacted," events unfold in ways that are sometimes confusing, contradictory, not immediately readable; the movie's structure alone is a metaphor for the struggle to make sense out of chaos. As in any De Palma movie, we're reminded we can't always trust what we see -- we need to be sure we're reading what we see as well. De Palma has said that he was moved to make "Redacted" over his anger at how the Iraq war has been underreported by the media, and I believe him when he says he wants to bring events and images that have been hidden from us out into the open so American citizens will be driven to take action. But I think "Redacted" is a personal movie more than a political one: If it were merely political, a topical response to current events, it wouldn't be nearly as effective.

"Redacted" revisits the themes of De Palma's greatest picture (and possibly the greatest film of the '80s), the 1989 "Casualties of War" -- also based on a true story -- in which Michael J. Fox plays a Vietnam War soldier who tries to prevent the rape and murder of a Vietnamese girl, and whose ineffectuality haunts him, we can be certain, for the rest of his life. (The girl is played by an actress named Thuy Thu Le; it's the only performance she has ever given, but it's so potent, so devastating, that it constitutes a career by itself.) "Redacted" isn't the supreme blend of emotion and artistry that "Casualties" is. "Casualties" is opera, while "Redacted" is only operatic. But both movies mark De Palma as a filmmaker who's deeply, almost painfully attuned to human suffering. If Hitchcock is the filmmaker De Palma is most often linked with (ad nauseam, though for some good reasons), in "Casualties" it's also possible to draw threads from the work of Satyajit Ray, Renoir and De Sica, even though, stylistically, he has little in common with any of those filmmakers.

"Redacted" doesn't have the grace, the lacerating beauty, of "Casualties." And perhaps the movie is least effective when De Palma is working hardest to evoke the dehumanizing aspect of war: The faces of the movie's coldest characters, Rush and especially Flake, are hard blanks, impossible to read -- maybe their emptiness is what allows them to rape and murder (they also kill the girl's family), but their coldness would be even more chilling if De Palma had humanized them just a little bit, instead of allowing them to be monsters with unholy appetites.

But the movie's failings don't dilute De Palma's intent: This is a picture that's electric and alive, and the fact that it's so loaded with feeling is part of what makes it so difficult to watch. The movie has provoked a certain amount of outrage, both among those who haven't seen it (like Bill O'Reilly, who has denounced it as anti-American) and those who have. It has certainly gotten under the skin of New Yorker journalist George Packer, the author of "The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq." In a New Yorker blog entry in October, Packer questioned, and denounced, De Palma's motives: "And what is the point? That we're all the same, Zarqawi, Lynndie England, the rapists in Mahmudiyah, CNN, Ashley Gilbertson, the readers of the Times, yours truly -- we're all accomplices in the great act of violation that is the Iraq war."

Packer, a terrific journalist and one of many voices of reason heard in the superb Iraq war documentary "No End in Sight," clearly feels that De Palma has personally insulted him and his ilk, and while I understand his hurt feelings, I think he's missing the point even though he's put his finger right on it. De Palma has always explored feelings of guilt and complicity. When I wrote about "Redacted" briefly from Toronto in September -- that tongue-tied brevity was all I could manage in the hours after I first saw it -- I said that I thought what De Palma was trying to do was to sharpen our collective guilt over this current war into something more personal, more cutting. And he wants us to face the specifics of this war squarely, not recoil from them.

Packer, of course, has spent time in Iraq -- he certainly isn't guilty of recoiling. But then, his specific experience means that in the context of "Redacted," he's not the average American moviegoer, either. Nor is he a critic: It's telling that he begins his entry by noting that De Palma's "other films include 'Dressed to Kill' and 'Scarface.'" He fixates on two of De Palma's most sensationalistic pictures, with no mention of "Casualties" or even of the overtly political "Blow Out."

The rape scene in "Redacted" is extremely difficult to watch; our impulse is to look away, as if doing so would somehow preserve some sense of decency in ourselves. De Palma doesn't dilute the horror of the rape by shaping it into something comfortably cinematic, something we can deal with as "art." De Palma has always been interested in collapsing the distance between viewer and subject (for all his love of stylization, he's a hot director, not a cool one), and "Redacted" shrinks that distance to a degree that's bound -- no, designed -- to distress viewers.

But for De Palma, portraying an act of rape in a way that doesn't horrify us would constitute a betrayal of the act's magnitude. He needs to personalize it, to hit us where we live and not just in the place where we think, analyze, rationalize. That's the De Palma way: No wonder he infuriates some people and inspires devotion in others. "Redacted" isn't great De Palma -- it may not even be good De Palma -- but it's pure De Palma. We're separated from this girl in the movie not by thousands of miles, or even by the space between her and the camera lens, but by a membrane, a millimeter's breadth of life, and that millimeter of life is everything.

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