Get ready for the absolute
worst performance of Meryl Streep’s career!
Ben Affleck had his Gigli. Dustin
Hoffman had his Ishtar. Robert DeNiro
had his Rocky and Bullwinkle movie.
Now,
Meryl Streep has her Rendition.
Reese Witherspoon
stars as
Isabella – the pregnant wife of an Egyptian national, Anwar
(Omar Metwally),
who has been working and living in the United States
since he was a
teenager. When
returning from a
conference in South Africa
and making his connecting flight in Washington,
DC, Anwar is
arrested by the CIA, and interrogated for a
possible connection to a terrorist attack in North
Africa
(I guess the filmmakers were afraid to pick a particular city or
country, or
should be given a globe for their birthdays).
Isabella doesn’t know
why
her husband has disappeared. Her
old
friend, who is a Senate staffer, Alan (Peter Sarsgaard), wants to
uncover a
possible powder keg of a story, and the CIA guy on the ground in North Africa, Douglas (Jake
Gyllenhaal) is inexperienced
and in over his head, while wondering if such extreme measures are
necessary
and right.
Is Anwar innocent? Does that matter to the
interrogators?
Rendition wants to be a
multi-faceted, politically charged thriller like Syriana,
Traffic
or Babel,
but not all of the
parts are equally scintillating.
Director Gavin Hood makes Rendition into a dramatic, challenging,
and
sometimes shocking film when focused on the capture and questioning of
Anwar,
but I felt like I was losing interest every time the movie started to
focus on
the personal stories of each character.
While the personal story of
Anwar and Isabella is the story of the movie, Hood and writer Kelley
Sane go
off on too many tangents regarding the evil inquisitor, Abasi (Yigal
Naor), and
the problems he has with his family, as well as the budding
relationship
between his daughter and a terrorist in training (a Romeo and Juliet
story that
could have been its own movie with time to be developed properly). Most of it felt out of place
and the way Hood
and Sane attempt to wrap it into the ending of the movie felt forced
and like a
horrible excuse for making us endure the tedium.
However, it is Meryl Streep
who has to live down Rendition as a reminder of mistakes made
and recorded on
film and DVD forever (and mocked by hacks like me).
As the mysterious CIA muckety muck Corrine Whitman,
she might as well have walked around the entire movie wearing an
“I Hate Bush”
sticker. She affects the most annoying, unrealistic and phony Texas
twang you may ever hear in your
life. Sylvester
Stallone could sound
more like a Texan than Streep does here as she tries too hard to make
us think
Corrine is pure evil incarnate.
In attempting to prove how
evil her character is, Streep fails to make us think Corrine has strong
convictions about her own actions and perceived patriotism. Streep doesn’t
have to agree with the
character’s beliefs, and many in the audience may not agree,
but I think she
has to at least make us feel this person is convinced she is doing the
right
thing rather than making her into a cartoon character who can too
easily be dismissed.
Compare it to her
performance as Miranda Priestly in The Devil
Wears Prada. The
writers, director and Streep herself took
a character who was clearly evil, and found moments to complicate her,
give her
some sense of justifying her behavior to herself, and even showed some
soul. That’s
more interesting than
watching a villain who is on the verge of twisting a moustache,
laughing
maniacally and attempting to tie Reese Witherspoon to the train tracks.
Rendition
wastes a good cast on an average movie.
1
½
Waffles (Out of 4)
Rendition is
rated R for torture/violence and language.
Copyright
2007 - WaffleMovies.com
