Rendition (5 stars out of 5 stars)

Last night, my wife and I watched the 2007 film, Rendition, starring Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, Alan Arkin, Omar Metwally, and Peter Sarsgaard. I consider this one of my favorite movies from 2007. The movie is two intertwined stories about an assassination attempt on an African government official and a subsequent torture/interrogation of a suspect, with a second parallel story about the official's daughter and the boy that she is in love with. The movie is ultimately a genius critique of torture as a method of extracting information, as well as a story about the very high human costs of torturing the wrong man.

First, a suicide bomber detonates himself in a crowded town square in a failed assassination attempt of an important government official (we never quite learn who he is or what he does, only that he works with the CIA and the American government in the war on terror). Gyllenhaal witnesses the attack. He and a colleague from the CIA are in a car, stuck in traffic, when the bomb goes off. His colleague is hit by shrapnel and dies in Gyllenhaal's lap. Because of the thinness of the CIA's resources in the region, Gyllenhaal is immediately promoted to oversee the interrogation of a person of interest. It his first torture, in other words.

The main person of interest is an Egyptian-born American (non-citizen) chemical engineer who is in South Africa, Capetown for a conference at the time of the attack. He is flying back home to his pregnant wife, played by Witherspoon, and his 6-year-old son. Upon landing in Washington, DC, local police and officials "detain" him. Or maybe detainment isn't the right word. "Kidnapped" seems like a more accurate description of what happens, because when he lands, uniformed police officers escort him to a stairwell, and hand him off to masked men who throw a black bag over his head and whisk him away. While being briefly interviewed by a CIA agent, we learn two sets of facts about the engineer. First, there is circumstantial evidence linking him to the attack. He is Egyptian, and the attacks were orchestrated by an Egyptian Islamic terrorist cell. He is a chemical engineer who worked with Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms six years earlier on a project related to bomb-making, and thus possesses knowledge of explosives. And the most damning, he has five telephone calls to his cell phone from an Egyptian person who is a known terrorist. The other set of facts we learn is that he claims to have no knowledge of the cell phone calls, and denies that he is working with terrorists. The head of the CIA believes there further interrogation is warranted, since one American CIA agent was killed in the attack. Using a legal loophole that had expanded since 9/11, the CIA sends the engineer back to Africa for "interrogation" under a policy called "extreme rendition." Since torture is illegal in the United States, the CIA relies on other countries to do it for them.

A second distinct storyline, but related in an unknown way, involves the African government official's daughter, who is Muslim and in love with a Muslim radical. To discuss how this story fits into the other would give away some of the more interesting things about this movie, so I won't. But I can say that the liaison is in appropriate, not only because her father is working with the American government to deal with local terrorist cell groups in the region, but also because her father has already arranged for her to marry another man. This girl's story gives us insight is an important story, because through it we learn about the motivations of a young radical, and serves to illustrate some of the unintended consequences of torture.

The film is not generically a critique of the war on terror. We are shown racial Islamic terrorists who are indiscriminate in their attacks, willing to murder women and children in their campaigns of intimidation and shaming via suicide attacks. We are given a backdrop of 9/11 which serves to convey that terrorist cells in faraway places eventually make their way to American shores, thus making it in America's best interest to address the groups at the source of their growth and birth. The film is very focused in its criticism: its objection is to the morality and efficiency of torture as a tool used in combatting terrorism. The engineer is flown back to Africa where the government official targeted in the assassination attempts to extract information from him about the attack using various techniques such as water-boarding, electrocution and solitary confinement. This movie does an excellent job of laying out carefully the key issues involved with that calculation - that torture likely has a high false positive rate (ie, we will end up torturing a high number of innocent people) and the information we get is questionable in value (ie, there is a high noise to signal ratio because innocent people will say anything they think we want to hear). The movie focuses, in other words, on the costs of torture, and forces us to modify our understanding of torture's efficacy.

As I said starting out, this was one of the best political thrillers I'd seen in a long time. It's far better than Michael Clayton, for instance. It's far better than any of the other political thrillers that came out in 2007, if I had to guess. The movie is well-written, well-acted, well-conceived and well-executed, and uses innovative narrative techniques to illustrate political theories about the negative feedback effects associated with torture (ie, that it breeds terrorism). I give it five stars out of five stars. This film came under the radar in 2007. Boxofficemojo.com shows that it opened Friday, October 9th, 2007 to 2,250 theaters, which is a moderate opening. Definitely not a blockbuster opening, but for a political thriller with incisive commentary about torture and the war on terror, relatively large. It average $600-700 a screen the first weekend, which then dropped significantly to $300-400 the second and third weekends. It ended its domestic run with around $9 million and then disappeared. For some reason, the film never found its audience. Maybe because that category - political thriller/war on terror commentary - was crowded last winter. For instance, Lion for Lambs, which also starred Meryl Streep along with Robert Redford and Tom Cruise, opened roughly around the same time that Rendition ended, and would also only go onto make $15 million (despite a $35 million production budget). Charlie Wilson's War opened in December with an all-star cast: Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts starring, and Aaron Sorkin writing. This movie did the best, by far, of the three with domestic revenues equalling $66.5 million (with a production budget of $75 million). This would turn out to be one of Tom Hanks lowest earning films ever. Then of course there was Michael Clayton which opened on October 5th, 2007, one week before Rendition. Clayton, starring Clooney, is also a political thriller, though it's more generally one from the lawyer genre and more focused on corporate corruption and environmental degradation than it is on American foreign policy. Nevertheless, this movie also opened against Rendition and likely sucked some of the wind out of its sails too. Clayton has as of this date earned around $50 million, and received some Oscar buzz as well. But given that it had Clooney in it, this is again one of his lower earning films as of late.

I mention the other films to try and make sense of why this film went under the radar like it did. All the political films showed up during the Oscar season, and all of them were low revenue earners and most did not break even (did any break even?) with the domestic run earnings.